The Roman Catholic Church (1095–1294)

The Roman Catholic Church (1095–1294)

I – Popular Faith

In many respects, religion is the most interesting human custom, for it is man’s final interpretation of life and his only defense against death. In medieval history nothing impresses the mind like the omnipresent existence of a religion that is sometimes almost all-pervasive. For those who live today in comfort and abundance, it is difficult to understand the chaos and misery that shaped medieval creeds. But just as we must keep in mind the hardships, poverty, and sufferings of medieval Christians, Muslims, and Jews, we must view their superstitions, revelations, idolatry, and credulity through the same lens. The flight of thousands of men and women from “the world, the flesh, and the devil” to monasteries and convents tells as much of the disorder, insecurity, and extreme violence of the Middle Ages as it does of the cowardice of such people. It seemed self-evident that curbing the appetites of fallen humanity required a set of moral principles derived from supernatural powers. Thus, above all, the world needed a faith that would balance hope and suffering, soften the pain of deprivation with consolation, soothe the aching heart of the laborer with the music of belief, compensate for the brevity of life with eternal existence, and give inspiring and majestic significance to the drama of the universe. Otherwise life might be only the unbearable and futile tale of the coming and going of peoples, species, and stars, each doomed to inevitable destruction.

Christianity sought to meet these needs with an awe-inspiring and epic conception of creation and human sin, the Virgin Mary, and the crucified Christ, together with ideas about the immortality of the human soul—a soul destined on the last day of judgment to appear before divine justice or be condemned forever to hell, or, through the intercession of the Church and its sacraments, be freed from torment and attain eternal salvation. It was within the four walls of such a limited horizon that most Christians lived and found meaning in their existence. The greatest gift of medieval faith was its preservation of humanity’s confidence that ultimately right would triumph over wrong and that every apparent victory of evil would lead to the exaltation of universal good.

In Christianity, as in Islam and Judaism, the Last Judgment was the axis of religion. Belief in Christ’s Second Coming and the end of the world as prelude to Judgment Day persisted despite the disappointments of the apostles, the passing of the year 1000, and the fears and hopes of forty generations; though its intensity and universality had diminished, it had not vanished. In 1271 Roger Bacon said, “The wise believe that the end of the world is near.” Every epidemic or disaster, every earthquake or comet or other extraordinary event, seemed to the people a herald of the world’s end. But even if the world’s life did not end, the souls and bodies of the dead would immediately rise to face their true Judge.

People vaguely hoped for heaven but openly feared hell. In medieval Christianity, perhaps more than in any other faith in history, there was much love, but in Catholic theology and preaching, as in early Protestantism, it seemed necessary to emphasize the terrors of hellfire. To the people of that age, Jesus was not the “gentle, humble, and meek Christ” celebrated in modern church hymns, but a stern avenger who punished every mortal sin.

Almost every church had an image portraying Christ as Judge. In many churches there were paintings of the Last Judgment that depicted the torments of the damned far more vividly and prominently than the blessings of the righteous. It is said that St. Methodius converted Boris, king of Bulgaria, by painting a picture of hell on the wall of the royal palace. Many mystics claimed to have seen hell in visions and therefore described its geographical location and terrors. A monk named Tundale, who lived in the seventh century, delicately detailed the horrors of hell. He said that in the center of hell Satan was bound with chains of red-hot iron to a burning gridiron. The cries he uttered from his throat in pain were endless. His hands were free, reached out, seized the damned, and crushed them like grapes under his teeth. His fiery breath swallowed them into his burning throat. Satan’s assistants, with iron hooks, alternately plunged the bodies of the damned into fire and then into ice water, or hung them by their tongues, or sawed them in pieces, or flattened them on an anvil, or boiled them and strained their essence through cloth. In the environment of hell, sulfur was mixed with fire to add a foul stench to the miseries of the damned. But the fire gave no light, so that a dreadful darkness hid the infinite variety of pains and torments from view.

The Church itself officially offered no explanation of hell’s location or characteristics, but it grew angry with those like Origen who doubted the reality of hellfire. Obviously, if the Church were to soften these ideas even slightly, it would undermine the main purpose of all the doctrines that had spread about hell. St. Thomas Aquinas believed that “the fire that torments the bodies of the damned is corporeal,” and in his view hell was located “in the deepest part of the earth.”

In the imagination of ordinary medieval people, and in the minds of figures like Gregory the Great, the devil was not a metaphor but a living being who lay in wait everywhere, planted every temptation in human hearts, and was the cause of every evil act; usually he could be repelled with a sprinkle of holy water or the sign of the cross, but the devil left a very foul smell of burning sulfur. He loved women greatly, used their charms and smiles as tools to ensnare his victims, and—according to the ladies themselves—sometimes received their favors. For this reason a woman from Toulouse confessed that she had often slept with the devil and, through his efforts, at the age of fifty-three had given birth to a monster with a wolf’s head and a serpent’s tail. The devil was aided by a vast host of demons; these were always flying around every individual and persistently scheming to lead people into sin. These foul beings also liked to “sleep” with incautious, single, or chaste women. A monk named Rishalm wrote about these beings: “The whole world is full of them; the entire air is nothing but a dense mass of demons who always and everywhere lie in wait for us … It is astonishing how any of us survives. Were it not for the blessing of divine grace, none of us would have the power to escape these demons.” Almost all people, including philosophers, believed in this innumerable host of devils; but a saving vein of delicate humor lessened the terror of this demonology, and in the minds of many healthy men these little devils seemed more like mischievous imps than terrifying beings. It was believed that these beings, unseen, entered people’s conversations, punctured their clothes, and threw filth at passersby.

Another idea that caused more fear was the belief that “many are called, but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14). Orthodox theologians, whether Muslim or Christian, believed that most of humanity would go to hell. Most Christian theologians accepted literally the saying attributed to Jesus: “He who believes and is baptized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:16). St. Augustine reluctantly concluded that infants who die before baptism go to hell. St. Anselm believed that the damnation of unbaptized children (who were vicariously guilty of Adam and Eve’s sin) was no more unreasonable than the enslavement of children born among slaves—and to him that seemed entirely reasonable. The Church modified this doctrine by saying that unbaptized children did not go to hell but to limbo, and their only torment was the pain of losing heaven. Most Christians believed that all Muslims—and most of them, except Muhammad himself—were destined for hell. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) declared that no one could attain salvation except as a member of the universal Church. Ramon Llull, a Spanish philosopher and scholar, hoped that “God so loves His servants that almost all will attain the grace of salvation, for if most servants were to suffer eternal torment instead of salvation, then the mercy of Jesus would be devoid of universal love.” But Pope Gregory IX condemned this statement as a reprehensible heresy. Thereafter no reputable theologian allowed himself to believe or say that the number of the saved exceeded the number of those condemned to eternal torment. Berthold of Regensburg, one of the most famous and popular preachers of the thirteenth century, estimated that the ratio of the damned to the saved must be one hundred thousand to one. St. Thomas Aquinas believed that “in this matter also divine mercy is especially manifest in that it elevates only a few to that degree of salvation which the many fail to reach.” Many people regarded volcanoes as the mouths of hell, their rumblings as a faint echo from the throats of the damned. Gregory the Great claimed that the mouth of Mount Etna opened daily to receive the many people destined for hell. The swollen bowels of the earth held in their fiery embrace the vast majority of all human beings who had ever set foot on the earth. For the condemned there was, forever, no respite and no escape from that hell. It was one of Berthold’s sayings that one should count the pebbles on the seashore or the hairs that have grown on human or animal bodies since the time of Adam; for every pebble or hair count one year of torment; all that length of time is only the beginning of the misery the damned must endure. The last moment of a person’s life was forever of supreme importance, and the fear that one might remain a sinner in that final moment and not receive forgiveness weighed heavily on people’s souls.

Belief in purgatory somewhat eased these terrors, but with great caution. Praying for the dead was a practice as old as the Church itself. Even from the year 250 we find evidence of seeking pardon and offering Masses to help the souls of the departed. Augustine spoke of the possibility of a place where people who had not fully repented before death, but whose sins were later forgiven, would be cleansed. Gregory the Great endorsed this idea and suggested that the sufferings of souls in purgatory could be alleviated by the prayers of their living friends. Belief in this hypothesis did not fully take root among the common people until around 1070, when Peter Damian, with fiery eloquence, gave it life. In the twelfth century a legend helped popularize the idea: St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, to convince some skeptics, had ordered a pit to be dug in Ireland and several monks to descend into it. When these monks emerged from the hole, according to the legend, they described purgatory and hell so vividly that it caused the listeners distress. Owen, an Irish knight, claimed that in 1153 he had gone through that hole into hell. His description of the adventures in that underworld contained many successes. Curious people came from far and wide to see the pit, and a way to earn income was opened for unsuitable persons. For this reason, in 1497 Pope Alexander VI called the pit a den of charlatans and ordered it closed.

Now we must ask what proportion of the people who lived in the medieval Christian world believed in Christian doctrines. History mentions many heretics, but most of these people believed in the principles and foundations of Christianity. In Orléans in 1017 two “of the most exalted men of the age in lineage and learning” denied creation, the Trinity, heaven, and hell and called the whole thing “nonsense.” John of Salisbury, in the twelfth century, says that he himself heard many people utter words “contrary to the opinions of the faithful.” Villani, the chronicler of that age, notes that in Florence there were people living dissolute lives who mocked God and the saints and were slaves to sensual appetites and bodily pleasures. Gerald of Wales tells of a priest he rebuked for not performing the Mass with due care; the priest grew angry and asked the critic whether he really believed in the transubstantiation of bread into the body and wine into the blood of Jesus, the Incarnation, the virgin birth of Mary, and the Resurrection, and explained that all these notions had been fabricated by a band of ancient charlatans to keep people in fear, and that now a band of hypocrites followed this practice. The same Gerald relates that Simon of Tournai (c. 1201), one of his contemporaries, one day raised his hands in prayer and said, “O Almighty God! How long will this superstitious Christian sect and these newfangled fabrications endure?” About the same Simon it is related that during a lecture, with the help of clever arguments, he proved the doctrines of the Trinity, and when the audience applauded and he became intoxicated with his own success, he boasted that he could prove the opposite with even stronger arguments. It is said that as soon as these words left his lips, he was struck with paralysis and madness on the spot. Around 1200, Peter, prior of the Holy Trinity monastery in Aldgate, London, wrote: “There are some who do not believe in the existence of God and say that chance is the source of the universe … There are many people who believe neither in good angels nor in evil angels, nor in life after death, nor in anything else invisible or spiritual.” Vincent of Beauvais lamented that many “dreamers and storytellers (about the saints) are mocked as vulgar fables or unknown lies,” and he himself explained: “If people who do not believe in hell do not accept such stories, it is obvious that their action should not surprise us.” Accepting these religious ideas about hell was not easy for many. Some simple-minded people asked: “If God already knew about sin and the fall of Satan, why did He create him?” Skeptics claimed that God could not be so cruel as to punish a person for a limited sin with unlimited torment. Theologians answered this claim by saying that committing one of the mortal sins is an offense against God and therefore involves unlimited guilt. In 1247 a weaver from Toulouse, unconvinced by such arguments, said: “If I could lay my hands on that God who saves only one out of a thousand people He has created and sends the rest to hell, I would seize Him like a traitor, tear His limbs apart violently, and spit in His face.” Other skeptics argued more cheerfully that the soul and body become calloused and insensitive to the fire of hell after a time, and therefore “whoever becomes accustomed to hell is as comfortable there as anywhere else.” That old joke—that in hell one has congenial company far more interesting than the inhabitants of heaven—appears in the French romance Aucassin and Nicolette (c. 1230). Priests complained that most people postponed thinking about hell until the moment of death, believing that no matter how many sins they had committed in life, “the utterance of three words ego te absolvo will save me.” Apparently in that age, as today, there were heretics even far from the noise of the city, but nothing remains of rural heretics; and the literature that has come down to us from the Middle Ages is mostly from the pens of clerics or of individuals whose works were scrutinized by a select group of clerics. In the midst of these works we encounter “wandering scholars” who composed poems contrary to decency and described rough city-dwellers who uttered the most blasphemous curses; people slept in churches, snored, and even danced and committed sexual acts. (According to a monk) “On Sunday they committed so much debauchery, gluttony, murder, and theft that it exceeded all the outrages they had committed throughout the entire week.” Such accounts, which indicate a lack of genuine faith, were not confined to one particular place, and similar cases can be cited from various countries over a thousand years. These kinds of evidence should alert us not to exaggerate the sanctity of medieval people; yet what the scholar gathers from studying the Middle Ages is an environment filled with religious beliefs and rituals. Every European country in this age rose in support of the Christian faith and by law made everyone subject and obedient to the Church. Almost all kings bestowed lavish gifts upon the Church. Almost every historical event was interpreted according to religious standards. Every implicit event in the Old Testament prefigured an event that appeared in the New Testament. St. Augustine said: “In the Old Testament the New is hidden, and in the New the Old is revealed.” For example, the worthy bishop David believed that the fact that the prophet David watched Bathsheba bathing was an allegory for Jesus Christ seeing His Church cleansing itself from the impurities of the world. Every natural thing was a symbol or sign of something supernatural. Gulielmus Durandus, bishop of Mende, believed that every part of the church had a particular religious meaning: the porch of the church is Christ, through whom we enter heaven; the columns of the church are the bishops and doctors of the faith, upon whom the Church rests; the womb of Mary—where Jesus took on human flesh—is the sacristy of the church, where the priests put on their ecclesiastical robes. In the same way, every beast and bird had a particular religious meaning. In a medieval treatise on beasts it is said: “The lioness that gives birth to a cub brings it forth dead. The mother watches over it for three days; on the third day the father arrives, breathes on the face of the cub, and brings it to life. In the same way the Almighty Father raised His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, from the realm of death to the world of life.” The acceptance of the people, and especially their imagination, led to the spread of a hundred thousand stories about miracles and supernatural events and powers. An English devil child tried to steal chicks from a nest; the child’s hand miraculously stuck to the stone he was leaning on, and it was only the prayers of the three villagers for three days and nights that saved the child from that peril. A child in a shrine offered a piece of bread to an image portraying Jesus as a child. The stone face of Christ thanked the child and invited him to heaven. Three days after this introduction the child died. “A lewd priest fell in love with a woman and wanted to have his way with her. Since he could not win her consent, after the Mass he kept the wafer—which had become the pure flesh of Jesus—in his mouth, hoping that when he kissed the woman, by the power of that sacred rite she would consent. But he had not yet left the precincts of the church when he saw that he had become so enormous that his head touched the ceiling.” The priest hid the wafer in a corner of the church and later confessed his sin to another priest. When they dug up that pure wafer from under the earth, they saw that it had turned into a bloody figure of a crucified man. A woman kept the pure wafer from the church to her house in her mouth and placed it in a beehive to prevent the death of the bees. These bees “built a small chapel from their sweetest honey for their sweetest guest, whose delicacy astonished the mind.” Pope Gregory the Great filled his works with such stories. Perhaps the people, or the literate among them, did not take these legends very seriously or saw them as a source of amusement and recreation, just as today stories of the same astonishing and wonderful kind amuse the tired brains of our presidents and kings. With the passage of time, credulity may have changed its form, but its field has not changed much. Many of these medieval legends indicate a genuine faith that people showed in religion, such as the story of the beloved Pope Leo IX who, after his travels and reforms in France and Germany, returned to Italy, and the waters of the Aniene River [like the Red Sea before Moses] parted so that he could cross the river.

The power of Christianity lay in giving people faith rather than knowledge, art rather than science, and beauty rather than truth. People preferred it that way. They suspected that no one could answer their questions; they felt it was wise to listen with the ear of faith to the answers the Church delivered with such calm assurance. If the Church were to consider itself fallible, the foundation of people’s trust in such an institution would certainly be shaken. Perhaps the people of that age were suspicious of science, for they regarded knowledge as the bitter fruit of a tree whose picking was forbidden by reason, and science was like a mansion that, with vain illusions, deprived man of the unadorned earthly paradise and a life free from doubt. Thus, the intellectual life of the Middle Ages almost entirely surrendered itself to faith and, just as modern man trusts in science and government, trusted in God and the Church. Philip Augustus, king of France, during a midnight storm, told his sailors: “Your destruction is impossible, for at this very moment thousands of monks are rising from their beds, and soon they will pray for us.” People believed that all were in the hands and care of a power far greater than what lay within the realm of any human science. In the Christian world, just like the Islamic world, people surrendered themselves to God and, even in the midst of debauchery, violence, and desecration of the sacred, were striving for God and eternal salvation. It was an age intoxicated with the intoxication of divinity.

II – The Sacraments

The greatest power of the Church, after defining and determining faith, was the performance of the sacraments—rites and ceremonies that symbolically indicated the bestowal of divine grace. St. Augustine said: “In no religion can individuals be kept united unless they are bound together through visible symbols or sacraments in one kind of brotherhood.” The word sacramentum was applied in the fourth century to almost all things that were sacred—baptism, the cross, and prayer. In the fifth century Thomas Augustine used this term for the Easter rites. In the seventh century St. Isidore of Seville limited it to baptism, confirmation, and the sacred sacrifice. Finally, in the twelfth century the sacraments were fixed at seven: baptism, confirmation, penance, the Eucharist, marriage, holy orders, and extreme unction. Ceremonies such as sprinkling holy water or making the sign of the cross were counted among the “appendages and adjuncts of the sacraments.”

The most important sacraments were baptism. Baptism served two purposes: first, to wash away the stain of original sin from the person; second, through this new birth, to formally bring the individual into the fold of Christians. In this ceremony the child’s godparents usually gave the child the name of one of the saints, so that the saint would be the child’s patron, model, and protector, and this became the child’s “Christian name.” In the ninth century the first method of baptism was to immerse the child completely in water, but gradually sprinkling water on the child, which posed less danger to the child’s constitution in northern regions, replaced that initial custom. Any priest, in case of necessity, could perform the baptismal rite for any Christian. In early Christianity it was customary to postpone baptism until the child had reached adulthood, but gradually, in the Middle Ages, the baptism of infants became widespread. In every locality, especially in Italy, a chapel—the baptistery—was built for the performance of this sacred rite.

In the Eastern Church, the rites of confirmation and the Eucharist were usually performed immediately after baptism for the child, whereas in the Western Church confirmation was gradually postponed until the age of seven so that the child would become familiar with the principles and foundations of the Christian faith during that period. The rite of confirmation was performed only by a bishop and consisted of “the laying on of hands” on the child’s head, accompanied by the recitation of a prayer so that the Holy Spirit would dwell in the volunteer’s body. Then the bishop anointed the child’s forehead with holy oil and gently struck his cheek (just as kings struck the shoulders of knights), which was a sign of confirmation of the Christian faith of the youth, and the volunteer implicitly committed himself by oath to observe all the rights and duties of a Christian individual.

More important than baptism was the sacrament of penance. If the doctrines of the Church instilled a sense of guilt in people, in return they provided a means by which every so often they could cleanse their souls from impurity by confessing their sins to a priest and performing the prescribed penance. According to the teachings of the Bible (Matthew 9:16 and 18:18) Jesus had forgiven the sins of His servants and had given His apostles similar powers to “bind and loose.” The Church believed that these powers had passed from Christ’s apostles to the bishops of the early Church, and in other words from the apostle Peter to the popes; in the twelfth century “the power of the keys of the kingdom” that was in the hands of the bishops was also given to the priests. In the period when Christianity was primitive, confession of sins was done publicly. In the fourth century private or confidential confession replaced public confession, so that the shame of great people who wished to confess their sins would not be great, but the custom of public confession remained among some heretical sects, and it was stipulated that in the case of some heinous crimes, like the massacre of Thessalonica or the killing of Thomas à Becket, the clergy had the right to impose public penance on the people. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) stipulated that annual confession and communion in the sacred sacrifice should be among the obligatory duties of the believer, and if anyone violated these two, he would be deprived of the right to use the blessings of the Church and burial in Christian cemeteries. To encourage sinners to confess and to protect them, every confession became a “sealed box,” and no priest was allowed to reveal what had been confessed to him. From the eighth century onward a treatise on “penance for sins” was published in which, according to the doctors of religion, a specific penance was prescribed for every sin, such as prayer, fasting, pilgrimage to holy places, giving alms, or other types of devotions and charitable works.

This sacrament of penance or, as Leibniz called it, “this astonishing foundation” had many good results. It freed the penitent from the constant and hidden melancholy caused by remorse; it allowed the priest, with the help of advice and need, to improve the spiritual and physical health of his followers; it consoled the sinner with the hope of reform; as Voltaire, who was himself a skeptic, said, the sacrament of penance was a means to prevent crimes. And Goethe, the famous German poet, said: “Private confession should never have been taken away from man.” But penance also had some bad effects. Sometimes this foundation was used for political purposes, as when priests refused to forgive the sins of the supporters of the emperors in the war with the popes. Sometimes it became a means of inquisition, as when Bishop Carlo Borromeo of Milan instructed his priests to force every penitent who came to confess his sins to reveal the name of every heretic or suspicious person he knew before them. Moreover, some simple-minded people regarded the forgiveness of sins as a license to repeat sins. Gradually, as the flame of faith cooled, the severe penances led penitents into the temptation of falsehood, and priests were permitted to prescribe lighter punishments for them, which usually consisted of giving donations to a charity approved by the church authorities. It was this “mitigation of punishments” that gradually led to the emergence of the custom of indulgences.

The purpose of indulgences was not to give the sinner permission to commit sin. Rather, the Church absolved the repentant and penitent sinner from all or part of the punishments that, as a result of committed worldly sins, he would have to endure in purgatory. The indulgence that the penitent received at the time of confessing his sins was release from the guilt that condemned him to the torment of hell, but it did not absolve him from the “this-worldly” punishment of his sin. Only a small minority of Christians were completely absolved in this world for the sins they had committed; the rest were forced to submit to punishment in purgatory for their unatoned sins in order to achieve complete absolution. The Church claimed the right to forgive some of the abundant treasury of divine grace, which had been accumulated through the sufferings and death of Christ and through the merits of saints whose virtues far exceeded their sins, on condition that the sinners fulfill good works and perform the prescribed devotions. Indulgences were a practice that went back to the ninth century. Some Christian pilgrims who visited holy places in the eleventh century received this mercy. The first general indulgence was announced by Pope Urban II; in 1095 he absolved all those who joined the armies of the First Crusade from their sins. With these precedents, the custom of absolving sinners in exchange for repeating a particular prayer, participating in a particular religious ceremony, building a bridge or road or church or hospital, clearing forests, or draining swamps, contributing financially to a crusade or a religious institution, and paying the cost of a religious festival or Christian jihad and the like became widespread. This method had many real uses, but it also provided an opportunity for a group of greedy clerics to amass wealth.

The Church appointed some clerics who were usually from the monks as “collectors” to collect sums by selling indulgences in exchange for devotion, penance, and gifts. These collectors, whom the English called “pardoners,” in their competition with each other showed such zeal and fervor that it caused the disgust of many Christians. These people, to encourage people to give gifts and offerings, displayed objects that were truly or falsely considered relics of the saints, and from what they collected they took a part that was either their share or to which they had no right, for their own benefit. The Church several times tried to reduce these kinds of abuses. The Fourth Lateran Council instructed bishops to warn the faithful against forged indulgences and false relics of the saints. In addition, it deprived the heads of monasteries of the right of indulgence and limited the similar powers of the bishops; and it asked all the clergy to observe moderation in their zeal for using this new means. In 1261 the Council of Mainz exposed a large number of these ecclesiastical collectors as a band of lying evildoers, because they showed the bones of animals or unclaimed dead as the bones of saints; they had trained themselves to shed floods of tears at the appointed time at will; and they sold the purgatorial punishments, at lower rates, for the maximum silver and gold and the minimum devotion. The Councils of Vienne (1311) and Ravenna (1317) each in the same manner condemned the actions of wicked priests, but the abuses continued.

After baptism came the Eucharist or the Mass [that is, partaking of the sacred sacrifice]. It was related from Jesus Christ that during the “Last Supper” he pointed to the bread and said: “This is my body.” And he pointed to the wine and said: “This is my blood.” The Church accepted these words in their literal meaning. The most important part of the Mass consists of transubstantiation, that is, the conversion of thin wafers of bread and a cup full of wine into the body and blood of Christ, by a miraculous power peculiar to the priest. The main purpose of the Mass was for the believer, by eating the pure bread and drinking the sacred wine, to partake in the “body and blood, soul and divinity” of the Son, that is, the second person of the Trinity. Since drinking the sacred wine involved the danger of spilling the blood of Jesus on the ground, in the twelfth century it became customary to be content with eating the bread, and since some conservatives (whose views were later adopted by the Hussites of Bohemia) demanded that they should partake in both the blood of Jesus and His body, the theologians explained that the blood of Christ is “concomitant” with His body in the sacred bread, and the body of Jesus is “concomitant” with His blood in the pure wine. A thousand miracles were attributed to the sacred bread and it was claimed that it repelled the evils of demons, cured diseases, prevented fires, and by blocking the throats of liars exposed them. Every Christian was obliged to participate in the Mass at least once a year, and the first time a young Christian did so, the ceremony was held with special pomp and rites.

Belief in the “real presence of Christ” gradually became widespread. The first time such a matter was presented as an official rule was at the Council of Nicaea in 787. In 855 a French monk of the Benedictine order named Ratramnus taught that the bread and wine are the body and blood of Jesus spiritually, not materially. Around 1045 Berengar, archdeacon of the church of Tours, doubted the reality of “transubstantiation”; for this reason he was excommunicated; and Lanfranc, prior of the Bec monastery, in a letter to him (1063) expressed the belief of the faithful in this way:

We believe that the earthly body … by a heavenly power that is beyond description and imagination … is changed into the substance of the body of the Lord, while the appearance and some external characteristics of that same external existence remain absent from view so that people do not become terrified by seeing those naked and bloodied limbs and the believers may attain more complete fruits of faith. At the same time, the body of the Lord, untouched, whole and complete, without stain or wound, is in heaven.

This belief was declared by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) as one of the most important principles of the Christian religion, and the Council of Trent in 1560 added that every particle of the sacred bread, no matter how small, contains the whole body, blood, and soul of Jesus Christ. In this way, one of the oldest customs of primitive peoples’ religion (which consisted of eating the god) is now prevalent and respected by a large number of people in civilized European and American societies.

The Church, by placing marriage among the sacraments and turning it into a religious vow and agreement, extraordinarily elevated the status and durability of the marriage bond. In the rite of holy orders, the bishop handed over to the new priest some of the spiritual powers that he had inherited from the apostles and which it was believed that God had conferred on His apostles in the person of Jesus Christ. In the last sacrament, extreme unction, the priest heard the confession of the dying Christian, forgave his sins to free him from the torment of hell, and anointed the members of his body to keep him from sin and make him worthy to rise again before his true Judge.

His survivors, instead of burning his body in fire according to the custom of pagan times, buried him according to Christian teachings, because the Church believed that the human body would also rise from the grave. Also, the survivors of the deceased shrouded the body, placed a coin in his coffin as if it were payment for Charon, and carried the corpse with great pomp and high ceremony to the cemetery. In some cases they hired people whose job was to lament and mourn the dead. The survivors of the deceased wore mourning clothes for a year, and no one could say whether after such a long mourning a repentant heart and a girded priest had guaranteed a place in heaven for the deceased or not.

III – Prayer

In every great religion, rites and ceremonies are as necessary as belief. Rites and ceremonies teach, nurture, and often create religious beliefs; they create a consoling relationship between the believer and his god; they captivate the senses and the soul with drama, literature, and art; by encouraging individuals to participate in rites, sing songs, and recite similar prayers, and finally by making them think alike, they bind them all together in one society and brotherhood.

The oldest Christian prayers were the Paternoster (Our Father) and the Credo (I believe). Toward the end of the twelfth century the tender and sincere prayer “Ave Maria” gradually took shape. In addition, at this time there were poetic communal prayers of praise and supplication to God. Some medieval prayers resembled the incantations and spells of sorcerers that are uttered for the occurrence of miracles; some turned into a series of repetitive formulas that despairingly canceled Christ’s command regarding “vain repetitions.” Monks and nuns and later laypeople, imitating an Eastern custom that the Crusaders had brought with them, gradually became accustomed to the rosary. Since this custom had been popularized by the Dominican order, in contrast the members of the Franciscan order promoted the “Via Crucis” or “Stations of the Cross,” which consisted of reciting prayers before fourteen images or pictures that depicted the various stages of the condemnation and crucifixion of Jesus. Priests, monks, nuns, and some laypeople recited or read the “canonical hours,” which consisted of prayers, selections from the Bible, psalms, and spiritual hymns that had been compiled by Benedict and others and codified in a brief prayer book by Alcuin and Gregory VII. In every day and night, almost every three hours, from a million chapels and homes of the people, these prayers of the believers sent a harmonious sound to heaven and the pipe. Undoubtedly their sound was sweeter music to the ears of the people who lived around these centers than any music except the hymns that united melodies and hearts and warmed the faith that was growing cold with the psalms of the Mass. From Novgorod to Cadiz, and from Jerusalem to the Hebrides, minarets and bell towers had dangerously raised their heads to the sky, because individuals without hope are unable to live and are not content to die.

IV – Religious Rites and Ceremonies

The Church, in the fine arts, spiritual hymns, and liturgy, wisely made room for the cult of Mary; but in the older elements of religious rites and ceremonies it basically placed emphasis on the more serious and majestic aspects of faith. Following ancient customs, and perhaps for hygienic reasons, the Church ordered the faithful to fast at appointed times: in this way every Friday they had to abstain from eating meat; during the forty days of Great Lent they were not to touch meat, eggs, or cheese; and during the month of fasting they were to break their fast every day at three o’clock in the afternoon; in addition, during this period, weddings, rejoicing, hunting, court proceedings, and sexual intercourse were prohibited. These instructions were the highest guide for self-purification and health that, although rarely observed to the letter, helped strengthen the will and tame the excessive appetites of gluttonous and lustful people.

The liturgy of the Church was another ancient heritage that was presented in high and effective forms in the mold of art, music, and religious drama. The psalms of the Old Testament, the moral prayers and sermons of the Temple of Jerusalem, selections from the New Testament, and the performance of the Eucharistic rites formed the initial elements of Christian worship. The schism between the Eastern and Western Churches led to different customs and rites; and the inadequacy of the early popes in extending their power beyond central Italy even caused diversity of form and variety of religious rites in the Latin Church. The particular religious rites that were customary in Milan spread to Spain, Gaul, Ireland, and northern Britain, and it was only in the year 664 that Roman religious customs replaced it. Pope Hadrian I, perhaps in completing the labors that Gregory I had undertaken, reformed the liturgy of the Church and sent it near the end of the eighth century in “a collection of religious rites and ceremonies” to Charlemagne. Gulielmus Durandus in his book, which is a classic medieval work and is called the Rationale divinorum officiorum (1286), explained the liturgy of the Roman Church.

The welcome that the common people of the Christian world gave to this book is evident from the fact that after the Bible this classic work was the first book to be printed.

The center and most important part of Christian worship was the Mass. In the first four centuries of the emergence of Christianity, these particular rites were called the Eucharist or the sacred sacrifice; and the remembrance of the Last Supper formed the most basic part of these rites. Over the course of twelve centuries, this rite became the main core of a series of intertwined hymns and prayers that varied according to the day and season of the year and the main purpose of each particular Mass, and its details, to facilitate the work of the priest, were included in the special book of the Mass. In the Greek Church and sometimes in the Latin Church it was customary that during the performance of these rites, men and women would sit in separate places. There were no seats for sitting. Everyone stood or knelt at particularly serious moments of the rite. Elderly or disabled people were exempt from this general rule. For monks or priests who had to stand for long periods during the religious rite, small ledge-like edges were installed on the side of the choir stalls of the church for support. These ledges or wooden shelves gradually became one of the highest manifestations of the art and taste of the carpenters and woodcarvers of the age. The priest who presided over the rite wore a robe on which he put a white garment, a sleeveless chasuble, a stole, and a special fringed cloth. These were all colorful garments on which ordinary decorations and ornaments were seen. The most prominent of these symbolic designs was usually the three letters IHS (abbreviation of Iesos Huios Soter, meaning “Jesus Son [of God], Savior”). The Mass began at the foot of the altar with a brief opening sentence, meaning that the priest said: “I will now go to the altar of the Lord.” The acolyte who came behind the priest said in response to this sentence: “To the God who gives joy to my youth.” The priest went up the steps of the altar and kissed it as the repository of the relics of the saints. Then he chanted the famous mention “Lord, have mercy on us,” which was a remnant of the Greek rites of the two Latin Masses; and he recited the prayer Gloria (Glory and majesty belong to the Lord who is most high and supreme) and the prayer Credo (Creed). Then he consecrated thin wafers of bread and a cup full of wine with the mention Hoc est corpus meum and also Hic est sanguinis meus and converted these transubstantiated elements—that is, the Son of God—by way of atonement in remembrance of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, and in exchange for the ancient custom of sacrificing living beings, to the presence of God. Then the priest turned to the faithful and invited them to direct their hearts, and his acolyte answered on behalf of the present faithful that “we have directed our hearts to God.” Then the priest recited the three prayers Sanctus (Holy), Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), Paternoster (Our Father). He himself ate a little of the sacred bread and wine, made the present people partake in the Mass, and after reciting a few more prayers ended the rite with the final sentence Ite, missa est (“Go, the Mass is ended”)—from which the English name of the Mass (Mass) probably came from the word missa in the above phrase. In the types of Mass that later became common, in addition to what we mentioned, the priest blessed the present people and read another part of the Gospel, which was usually the prologue of the Johannine Gospel of the apostle John. Usually no sermon was delivered in the Mass unless a bishop was the leader or, after the twelfth century, whenever a monk specially attended such gatherings to preach.

Initially, all Masses were sung, and the faithful present in the church also joined the priest in singing. From the fourth century onward, the participation of the present in the song gradually became obsolete and the “choir of the church” took on this duty, meaning that wherever it was stipulated during the rite, this group responded to the melody that the leader sang. The spiritual hymns that were sung in the various rites of church worship are among the most effective products of medieval art and emotions. The written history of Latin religious hymns begins with Hilary, bishop of Poitiers (d. 367). When this bishop went into exile and returned from Syria to Gaul, he brought with him a number of semi-Greek and semi-Eastern religious hymns, translated them into Latin, and himself composed several hymns; all of these hymns have now been lost. St. Ambrose in Milan started anew and of his melodious hymns that bound intense human emotions—and which greatly affected Augustine—eighteen pieces remain to this day. The magnificent hymn known as Te Deum laudamus about faith and thanksgiving to God, which was formerly attributed to St. Ambrose, is most likely the work of a Romanian bishop named Nicetas of Remesiana who composed it near the end of the fourth century. In later centuries the Latin religious hymns probably, under the influence of the lyrics of Muslim poets and Provençal troubadours, adopted a new delicate feeling and style. Some of these religious hymns (like some Arabic poems) were almost a series of sonorous meaningless words full of unlimited rhythms and rhymes, but the better hymns that belong to the most elite and flourishing periods of the Middle Ages, namely the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, acquired a kind of condensed phrasing, pleasant rhyme, and intellectual harmony and delicacy that placed them among the greatest lyric poems of world literature.

Around 1130 a young man from Brittany, whom we now know only as Adam of the monks of St. Victor, stepped into this famous monastery that was located outside the city of Paris. During the sixty years that he lived there after this date in contentment and resignation, he absorbed the spirit of figures like Hugh and Richard who were famous mystics and poured his perceptions with humility and in beauty and power into hymns that most of them were consecutively intended for the Mass. A century after Adam, a monk of the Franciscan order named Jacopone da Todi composed the highest lyric poem of the medieval period, namely the hymn Stabat Mater (the Mother stood). Jacopone was one of the skilled lawyers of Todi in the province of Perugia. His wife, who was famous for both beauty of character and appearance, was killed under the rubble as a result of the collapse of the stands in a festival assembly. Jacopone lost his senses from grief and, while loudly recounting his sins and sorrows, set out as a wild wanderer on the roads of Umbria, covered his body with tar and feathers of birds, and began to walk on all fours. Finally he joined the third order of the Franciscan monks, who were not subject to the strict rules of the monastery, and composed a poem that summarizes the loving piety of his age:

The broken-hearted mother, all in tears, stood before the cross, while her son hung dying from it, a sword of sorrow pierced the veil of her soul. Oh, how sorrowful and deeply afflicted was that mother who had become so fortunate with such a blessed son. And when she saw her noble son in torment, she trembled, began to wail, and uttered heart-rending groans. Who is there who, seeing the mother of our Savior in such torment, would not be sorrowful? Which person is there who, seeing that loving mother in the sorrow of her son, would not share in her grief … Come, my mother, source of love, let me understand the depth of your pain, let me mourn with you; let my heart be inflamed with the spark of beloved Jesus, our Lord and Savior; let me please Him in this way. Holy mother, do this for me, place in the depths of my heart the blows that were inflicted on the body of such a martyr; let me share in the sufferings of your son, who has taken deadly wounds and has submitted to disgrace for me. Let me weep from the bottom of my heart beside you, and mourn with you all the years of my life at the death of the crucified Savior. From the bottom of my heart I am ready to share in mourning with you and to stand with you beside the cross. Let me be safe in the shelter of the cross, see salvation through the merit of Christ’s sacrifice, and be nurtured by understanding His grace; then when my body turns to dust, let my soul face Him in the glory of the kingdom.

Among the Christian hymns of the Middle Ages only two pieces of poetry rival this poem with their fame. One is a timeless piece that St. Thomas Aquinas composed for the feast of Corpus Christi or the feast of the Body. The second is the awe-inspiring poem of the Day of Wrath that Tommaso da Celano composed around 1250 and is still recited in the Mass for the dead. In this case the terror of the Day of Judgment is the source of the poet’s inspiration and the cause of the creation of a poem as dark and flawless as any of Dante’s tormented dreams.

The Church added elaborate ceremonies and processions in religious festivals to its various religious rites and ceremonies of prayers, spiritual hymns, and the Mass. In the countries of northern Europe, in the feast of the Nativity of Christ, they adopted cheerful ceremonies that until the emergence of Christianity were dedicated to pagan Teutons. These customs of the pagan period were connected with the victory of the sun over the advancing darkness in the winter solstice, for this reason the famous “Yule” logs were burned by the people of Germany, northern France, England, and Scandinavia in their hearths, various gifts and offerings were hung from “Yule” trees, and feasting and revelry continued for twelve consecutive nights that exhausted the hardiest gluttonous people. There were many religious festivals and feasts—from the feast of the Epiphany of Christ, the feast of the Circumcision, Palm Sunday, the feast of the Resurrection of Christ, the feast of the Ascension, the feast of Pentecost, and the like. These days and all Sundays, albeit to a lesser extent than the blessed days, were exciting days in the lives of medieval people. The Christian individual usually confessed every sin he remembered on the feast of the Resurrection of Christ, purified himself, cut his hair and beard short, and put on his most luxurious and comfortable clothes. In the Mass he attained divine grace and more than ever became aware of the essence of those critical Christian dramas in which he played a role. In many cities, the last three days of Holy Week (or the week coinciding with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus) depicted the events of the sufferings of Christ during a religious play with simple dialogues and songs in the churches. These “passion plays” were presented to the people in several other cases from the feasts of the astronomical calendar of the Church. Around 1240 Juliana, the superior of a nunnery near Liège, informed the priest of her village that she had been inspired from the unseen to hold a festival with religious rites and customs to celebrate the pure body of Jesus as it is seen in the sacrament of the Eucharist in the form of transubstantiation. In 1262 Pope Urban IV approved the holding of such a feast and commissioned St. Thomas Aquinas to compose suitable prayers and spiritual hymns for that feast. That city philosopher performed this important task well, and in 1311 the feast of Corpus Christi was finally established; and it was celebrated with the most magnificent type of procession on the first Thursday after the feast of Pentecost. These kinds of ceremonies attracted large crowds and immersed a large number of participants in glory; these were the ones that paved the way for the worldly dramas of the Middle Ages; and they helped the elaborate ceremonies of the city guilds, tournament competitions, the rites of acceptance of individuals into the ranks of knights, and the coronations of kings with sudden religious excitements and ceremonies for the purification of soul and body to fill the occasional leisure times of people who were naturally not inclined to calm and peacefulness. The Church did not base its method of moral education on rational arguments from faith, but for this purpose it resorted to the senses of man with the help of drama, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, storytelling, and literature, and it must be acknowledged that these kinds of appeals to public feelings, whether for good or for evil, are far more effective than turning to the changing individual rational faculty. It was through appeal to the feelings of the people that the Church created medieval art.

The culmination of these magnificent and enduring ceremonies was in the centers that pilgrims turned to. Medieval men and women usually went on pilgrimage to certain places to atone for their sins or fulfill a vow, to seek a miraculous cure, to seek forgiveness of sins, and finally, like modern tourists, to see foreign landscapes and lands and find an adventure along the way to escape the monotony of their limited lives devoid of excitement. By the end of the thirteenth century the number of these Christian pilgrimage centers had reached about ten thousand. The bravest pilgrims resolved to travel to Palestine and sometimes on foot, or with a garment that was only a shirt, usually with a cross, staff, and a bag that a priest had all given them, set out on the road. In 1054 Lidbert, bishop of Cambrai, was the leader of a caravan of three thousand pilgrims to Jerusalem. In 1064 two archbishops of Cologne and Mainz, and the bishops of Speyer, Bamberg, and Utrecht, together with ten thousand Christians who followed them, set out for Jerusalem. Three thousand of this group perished on the way, and only two thousand returned safely to their homeland. Another group of pilgrims, to visit the bones that were said to be those of the apostle James in Compostela in Spain, crossed the Pyrenees or risked their lives across the Atlantic. In England Christian pilgrims went to see the tomb of St. Cuthbert in Durham, the tomb of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey, the tomb of St. Edmund in Bury, a church that people believed was built by the hand of Joseph of Arimathea in the town of Glastonbury, and above all to visit the tomb of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury. In France the destination of Christian pilgrims was St. Martin in Tours, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Chartres, and also another Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Le Puy-en-Velay. In Italy the destination of pilgrims was the church and bones of St. Francis of Assisi and the Santa Casa or Holy House in Loreto that according to the belief of the faithful was the same house where Mary and Jesus lived in Nazareth. It was famous that when the Turks drove out the last crusader from Palestine, angels lifted this house into the air and placed it on the ground in a place in Dalmatia (Loreto). Then they carried it across the Adriatic Sea and brought it to the woods of Ancona (Loretum), and for this reason that sacred village was named Loreto.

Finally all the roads of the Christian world led pilgrims to the city of Rome so that there they could visit the tombs of the two apostles of Jesus, Peter and Paul; have their sins forgiven by visiting the famous centers or churches of the city; or participate in the celebration of the anniversary of an important event from the events and feasts of Christian history. In 1299 Pope Boniface VIII announced preparations for a great celebration on the occasion of the year 1300 and decreed a general indulgence for all persons who would come to the city of Rome and participate in the worship ceremonies of the Church of St. Peter in that year. It has been estimated that in those twelve months there was no day when fewer than two hundred thousand people from foreign cities passed through the gates of the city of Rome; on the feast day, a total of two million pilgrims each gave a small amount as a gift; from these small gifts, in front of the tomb of the apostle Peter, such a vast treasure was piled up that two priests, with crooked shovels in hand, were busy collecting those coins day and night. Travel guidebooks taught pilgrims which road to travel and, before reaching the destination, what places to visit along the way. It is not difficult for us to understand what joy filled the hearts of the pilgrims when they saw the silhouette of the “eternal city” of Rome with their weary bodies and dusty figures, and how they all sang together in praise and glorification:

O noble Rome, O queen of all the cities of the world and more favored than all the cities of the world. O city that is reddened with the blood of martyrs and at the same time whitened with the lilies of virgin maidens; from across the years, we greet you. We praise you. From the tongues of all generations, we send you salutations!

The Church added some social customs to these various religious ceremonies. It taught people that working has dignity and is not a shame, and it itself, by employing monks in agriculture and industry, put its instructions into practice at the right time. It sanctified the organization of workers in guilds and itself took the initiative in forming religious orders for charitable works. Every church was a sanctuary for individuals, and people who were being pursued had the right to sit in one of them for as long as the excitement of their pursuers subsided and gave way to legal pursuit. Dragging people who had taken sanctuary out of churches by force was a kind of desecration of the religious institution that made the perpetrator deserving of excommunication. The church, or the cathedral, in addition to being a religious center, was in the position of a social club for the village or city. Sometimes the sacred precinct or even the church itself, with the consent of the cheerful clergy, was used for storing grain or straw or wine, for grinding wheat, or for brewing beer. There most of the village residents had been baptized and after death were buried in the ground. There the older men and women gathered on Sundays for discussion or chatter; and young girls and boys gathered to show themselves off and see others. There beggars gathered, and church alms were distributed. There all the works of art that the people of the village knew were gathered to decorate the house of God and the darkness of poverty in thousands of houses was illuminated by the light of a shrine that they themselves had built with great effort and considered their own and the common and spiritual home. From the tower of the church the bells announced the hours of the day and night or summoned the people to perform religious duties, and the sound of those bells was sweeter than any music except the hymns that united melodies and hearts and warmed the faith that was growing cold with the psalms of the Mass. From Novgorod to Cadiz, and from Jerusalem to the Hebrides, minarets and bell towers had dangerously raised their heads to the sky, because individuals without hope are unable to live and are not content to die.

V – Canon Law

Alongside this intricate and colorful liturgy, a more intricate series of canonical laws and rules came into existence that determined the procedure and decisions of the ecclesiastical courts that ruled over the fate of a realm far vaster and more diverse than any empire that had ever set foot on the stage of history. Canon law was in fact the gradual compilation of ancient religious customs, phrases from the Bible, the opinions of the Church Fathers, Roman or barbarian laws, the decrees of church councils, and finally the decisions and opinions of the popes. Some parts of Justinian’s code were adopted to supervise the conduct of Christian priests. Other sections were modified to conform to the Church’s views on marriage, divorce, and wills. In Western Europe the collection of canon laws took place from the sixth to the eighth century, but in the East the Byzantine emperors every so often compiled such rules. It was around 1148 that the laws of the Roman Church were definitively compiled in their medieval form by Gratian.

Gratian was initially a monk from the monasteries of Bologna who had probably studied under Irnerius at the university there. There is no doubt that his great work is a measure of his mastery of both Roman law and medieval philosophy. Gratian called his work the Concordance of Discordant Canons, which later generations called the Decretum (Decrees). In this book he organized the laws and customs, the decrees of church councils, and the popes, and the opinions of the Church—from the time of its emergence until the year 1139—about the principles of doctrine, rites and ceremonies, organization and administration of church property, the procedure and precedents of ecclesiastical courts, the rules of monastic life, and the contract of marriage and inheritance laws. It is possible that Gratian in his method of explanation and clarification of legal points was influenced by Abelard’s work known as Sic et Non, but what is certain is that after Gratian his method of analysis to some extent influenced the method of scholastic philosophers. Gratian’s method was to begin the discussion by mentioning a case from a reliable source, then quote all the opinions or precedents that existed in refutation of that case, attempt to resolve that contradiction, and add his own interpretation about that matter. Although the Church did not accept this book as a final authority, for the period that was the subject of discussion it was a very necessary and almost sacred collection. Gregory IX (1234), Boniface VIII (1294), and Clement V (1313) each added marginal notes and commentaries to it. These commentaries, and some other brief marginal notes, were published in 1582 with Gratian’s Book of Decrees under the title Corpus Juris Canonici, which this collection of ecclesiastical laws was equivalent to Justinian’s collection of civil laws. In fact the subjects and topics that came in canon law were far more extensive than any civil law code that had been compiled in that age. In canon law not only was the organization of the principles of religion and the work of the Church discussed, but this collection contained rules about the relations of Christian peoples with non-Christian nations in Christian lands, the procedure of inquisition and suppression of heresy, the organization of the struggles of the Crusaders, the laws of marriage, legitimacy, the wife’s share of the deceased husband’s property, adultery, divorce, wills, burial, widows, and orphaned children; also laws about oath-taking, perjury, desecration of the sacred, blasphemy, buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices, slander, usury, and just prices; regulations on the administration of schools and universities; “divine cessation” and other measures to limit war and prepare for peace; the administration of episcopal and papal courts; cases of issuing sentences of excommunication, cursing and prohibiting religious ceremonies and the order of arrest; the execution of punishments prescribed by ecclesiastical courts; and the relations between ecclesiastical and civil courts, and between government and the Church. The Church believed that this vast collection of laws was obligatory for all Christians, and it reserved the right to impose all kinds of corporal and spiritual punishments for any violation. Only none of the ecclesiastical courts had the right to issue a “blood verdict” or in other words a death sentence for a criminal.

Usually before the emergence of the Inquisition the Church relied on instilling religious fears in the hearts of potential offenders or criminals. Minor or partial excommunication deprived a Christian of performing the rites of the Church. This was a punishment that every priest had the right to impose at the right time. If a condemned offender died before seeking and receiving absolution, according to the belief of the faithful such excommunication amounted to eternal condemnation to eternal torment. Major excommunication (which is now the only type of excommunication by the Church) was a sentence that was issued only by religious councils or primates. And it was also only for a person or persons who were within the jurisdiction of the councils or bishops. The sentence of major excommunication deprived the condemned person of any legal or spiritual connection with the Christian community, meaning that the excommunicated could not seek justice from anyone in an ecclesiastical court, or have the right of inheritance, or perform an act that was legally valid, but others could pursue him; in addition, no Christian was allowed to sit at the same table with him or talk to him, because such an act would condemn the offender to minor excommunication. When Robert, king of France, was excommunicated for marrying his niece (998), all his courtiers and almost all his servants left him. The two servants who remained in the court threw into the fire every food that remained on the king’s table so that they would not be defiled by it. Sometimes when the crime was extremely severe, the Church, in addition to excommunication, cursed the offender. This meant that in addition to the sentence of excommunication it added a curse consisting of a series of elaborate, emphatic, and precise legal phrases. If the problem did not end there, then the last arrow in the pope’s quiver was the prohibition of all or most religious ceremonies. A people who considered themselves in dire need of religious rites and feared that they might suddenly be seized by the hand of death without the forgiveness of sins, sooner or later forced the excommunicated person to reconcile with the Church. Such prohibition orders were issued in 998 for France, in 1102 for Germany, in 1208 for England, and in 1155 for the city of Rome itself.

The excess in issuing excommunication and prohibition orders after the eleventh century greatly reduced the effect of this weapon that was in the hands of the popes. Sometimes the popes used the prohibition order for political purposes, as when Innocent II threatened Pisa that if it did not join the Tuscan Union it would face such a danger. General and collective excommunication orders—including in the case of people’s dishonesty in paying the tithes they owed to the Church—became so numerous that large sections of Christian society knowingly or unknowingly were deprived of social and spiritual rights, or if they became aware, they ignored the curse and mocked it. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the order of general excommunication was issued three times for Milan, Bologna, and Florence. Milan ignored the third prohibition order for twenty-two years. In 1311 Bishop Guillaume le Maire stated that “sometimes with my own eyes I have observed three hundred or four hundred, and even seven hundred excommunicated in the domain of one priest … who despised the power of the religious institution and uttered unseemly and blasphemous words against the Church and its servants.” Philip Augustus and Philip the Fair neither paid any attention to the excommunication orders that were issued about them.

These kinds of occasional disregards paved the way for the decline of the power of canon law over the non-clerical people of Europe. Since the Church had brought such a vast field of human activities under its command, during the first millennium of the spread of Christianity the power of non-religious governments was shattered, but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as non-religious governments gained more power, civil law also gradually took human affairs one by one out of the grasp of canon law. In the matter of the right to dismiss and appoint bishops and clergy the Church rightfully won the battle, but in most other issues such as education, marriage, morals, economy, and war its power and influence declined. The countries that, under the protection and with the permission of the Church, had grown up in the shadow of the social system crafted by the Church declared themselves mature and set out on the long process of separating civil and political affairs from religion, whose culmination we see today. But the work of the canon lawyers, like most creative activities, was not wasted, but prepared and trained the greatest statesmen of the Church, participated in the transfer of Roman law to the new world, raised the legitimate rights of widows and children, established the principle of the wife’s share of the deceased husband’s property in the civil law of Western Europe, and also helped to design the style and terms of scholastic philosophy. Canon law was one of the great achievements of medieval thinkers.

VI – The Clergy

In medieval conversations all people were divided into two classes: those who were within the sphere of religious influence, and those who were “of the world.” A monk was “a religious,” and a nun was the same. Some monks were also priests and formed the “regular clergy.” In this case the term regular priest meant a priest who followed the regula (the rules and regulations of the monastery). The other clergy were generally called “secular” clergy because they lived outside the supervision of monasteries or, in the terminology of that period, in the world. All monks, of any rank or degree, shaved the middle of their heads, wore a long high robe that was all of one color except red and green, and buttoned from head to toe. The term cleric applied not only to holders of “minor orders” like doorkeepers, readers, exorcists, and servants, but also to all university students, all teachers, and all individuals who had shaved their heads as theology students and later entered the ranks of physicians, judges, artists, and authors, or served as accountants or assistants to a scholar. Since all these individuals dealt with pen and book, in European languages the word cleric (Clerical) and the term clerk (Clerk) derive from the same source. Clerics who did not have high clerical ranks were allowed to marry and engage in any reputable profession, and were not obliged to shave the middle of their heads in the manner of monks.

The three “major” ranks or what were called the “holy orders” of priesthood, diaconate, and subdiaconate were positions that when a person accepted one of them it was impossible to withdraw from it; in general, holders of these ranks from the eleventh century onward had absolutely no right to marry. Among Latin priests after Gregory VII we encounter individuals who married or had concubines. But it must be known that after this date such cases were considered increasingly rare. A priest who was responsible for the religious affairs of a parish was necessarily content with spiritual pleasures. Since naturally the domain of a priest’s parish and also a lord’s village or a village both had the same boundaries, for this reason the priest was usually appointed with the opinion and success of the bishop as the lord or owner of the village. It was rare for a priest to be a learned and skilled person, because in that period acquiring higher education was expensive work, and books were scarce. For a priest it was sufficient to be able to read the prayers and the guidebook for religious duties and perform the rites and religious affairs of his parish. In many cases the priest was in fact a deputy priest whom the manager of the religious affairs of the parish hired to manage the religious affairs of that place in exchange for a quarter of the income from the parish. In this way the manager of the religious affairs of the parish might have income from four or five different parishes, while a priest in one place might live in poverty and destitution and make a living by taking “altar fees” at the time of baptism, marriage contract, burial, and the Mass for the dead. In this class struggle between the clergy, sometimes the priest took the side of the poor, as in the case of John Ball. His moral principles were not comparable to those of the modern priest—because, as a result of intense competition between religions and creeds, the priest is now forced to observe morals to the utmost degree—yet, in general, he performed his duties with kindness and patience and in obedience to the call of conscience; he visited the sick, consoled the afflicted, taught the young, recited the prayers in a mumbled manner, and tamed and made obedient to moral principles a rough and lustful people. Many priests of this period in the view of their fiercest opponent were “the cream of the people on earth.” Lecky, a historian who himself had no belief in religions, wrote: “No group of men has come who have been so unreserved and unblemished, with a zeal free from worldly interest, without any personal benefits, have sacrificed the dearest vanities of the world for duty and with fearless courage have endured every kind of hardship and even death.” The two positions of priest and bishop were among the holy ranks and degrees. A bishop was a priest who was elected to coordinate the affairs of several parishes that were under the supervision of several priests (and all formed one episcopal diocese). In principle and theory a bishop was elected by the priests and the people themselves. Usually before Gregory VII he was appointed by the lord or the king. After the year 1215 the work of electing the bishop was under the supervision of the assembly of priests of the cathedral church and with the cooperation of the pope. Many non-religious and also religious works were referred to the bishop, and the work of the special court of the bishop was to examine some civil claims, in addition to all disputes in which all priests, of any rank or position, had an interest. The bishop had the power to dismiss and appoint priests; but the powers of the bishop regarding the heads of monasteries and the administration of the affairs of the monasteries were gradually reduced, because the popes, who feared the power of the bishops, brought the various monastic orders directly under their own supervision. His income was partly from the tithes of the parishes of his priests and mostly from the lands that were attached to the episcopal administration. Sometimes he returned to the same parish more than what he took from the parish of one priest. Candidates for the episcopal position usually agreed to pay a sum for assuming such a position. Initially these kinds of payments were everywhere given to kings and then presented to the presence of the popes, and since the bishops were in the position of non-religious rulers, sometimes they submitted to human weakness and appointed their relatives to lucrative positions. Pope Alexander III complained that “since God deprived the bishops of children, the devil gave them nephews.” Many bishops, since they became feudal lords, lived in luxury, but there were many who spent their lives and efforts solely on performing their administrative and religious duties.

At the head of the bishops of a province was the archbishop or metropolitan. Summoning or presiding over a provincial church council was among the powers of the metropolitan. Some archbishops, because of their praiseworthy qualities or great wealth, almost ruled their provinces throughout their lives. In Germany the archbishops of Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Trier, Mainz, Magdeburg, and Salzburg were all powerful feudal lords, who in several cases the emperors elected them for the chancellorship, administration of the kingdom, consultation, and special representation of the empire. The archbishops of Reims, Rouen, and Canterbury played a similar role in France, Normandy, and England. Some archbishops—like the archbishop of Toledo, Lyon, Narbonne, Reims, Cologne, and Canterbury—reached the highest spiritual ranks and in their entire region became the source of imitation for the clergy in all religious matters.

Every so often the bishops formed a council that was in the position of an elected government for the Church. In later centuries these kinds of councils considered themselves to have powers far greater than those of the pope himself. But in the discussed period, coinciding with the emergence of the most powerful popes, there was no one in Western Europe who denied the absolute religious and spiritual powers of the vicar of God on earth, that is, the bishop of Rome. The scandals of the tenth century had been compensated by the virtues and merits of individuals like Leo IX and Hildebrand (Gregory VII). Amid the fluctuations and struggles of the twelfth century the power of the papal institution gradually expanded to such an extent that Innocent III claimed that the entire world should be under the seal of the spiritual caliph of Rome. Kings and emperors respectfully looked at the white-clad servant of the servants of God and kissed his foot. Now reaching the papal throne had become the highest goal of human ambition.

The greatest intellects of the age, in the strictest schools of theology and law, strove to obtain a position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy; and those who reached high positions were wise and courageous men who did not fear the heavy duty of administering a continent. The implementation of policies that took shape under the supervision of these individuals and their advisors was by no means stagnant with their death. What Gregory VII left unfinished Innocent III completed. The struggles that Innocent III and Gregory VII had begun to prevent the papal institution from being surrounded by emperors were brought to a victorious end by Innocent IV and Alexander IV. The struggles that Innocent III and Gregory VII had begun to prevent the papal court from being besieged by the emperors were completed victoriously by Innocent IV and Alexander IV.

VII – The Papacy at the Height of Its Power: 1085–1294

The collision between the Church and the government over the appointment and dismissal of bishops did not end with Gregory VII and the apparent victory of the German Empire, but continued for one generation during the reign of several popes and ended with the Treaty of Worms (1122) between Pope Callixtus II and Emperor Henry V. According to this treaty Henry undertook that from now on he would refrain from “any ceremony of investiture with the bestowal of ring and staff,” and agreed that the election of bishops and heads of monasteries should take place according to canon law, or in other words by the hands of the clergy or the related monks “and be free from any interference,” and ecclesiastical offices should not be put up for sale. In return, Pope Callixtus agreed that in Germany the election of all bishops and heads of monasteries who hold crown lands should take place in the presence of the emperor; whenever there is a disagreement in the election of these individuals, the king, after exchanging views with the bishops of the province, should decide between the parties; a bishop or head of a monastery who holds the king’s lands is obliged, according to feudal traditions, to fulfill the obligations of a vassal toward his lord and pay the prescribed dues and tributes. Similar agreements had previously been approved for England and France. After the conclusion of this pact, each side claimed victory.

The Church had made significant progress toward autonomy, but, due to feudal interests, kings throughout Europe still had a decisive voice in the appointment of bishops.

In the year 1130 a division occurred in the college of cardinals. One faction elected Innocent II as pope, and the other chose Anacletus II. Although Anacletus II came from the noble Pierleoni family, his grandfather was a Jew who had abandoned the faith of Moses and converted to Christianity. His opponents called him “the Jewish antipope.” St. Bernard, who in other cases had a favorable view of the Jews, in this particular case sent a letter to Emperor Lothair II and in it wrote: “It is a shame to Christ that a man of Jewish descent should come and sit on the throne of the apostle Peter”—apparently Bernard forgot that Peter himself was a Jew. Most of the clergy and all the kings of Europe—except one—supported Innocent. The people of Europe also entertained themselves with slanders of this kind that Anacletus committed incest with his relatives and plundered Christian churches to enrich his Jewish friends. But the people of Rome did not abandon their support for him until his death (1138). Perhaps the story of Anacletus was what led to the emergence of the legend of Andreas “the Jewish pope” in the fourteenth century. Hadrian IV is another prominent example of equality of opportunity and the advancement of capable men in the Catholic clerical institution. Hadrian, whose original name was Nicholas Breakspear, was born into a poor English family in England and was a poor child who went to the monastery. But solely because of his merit he became the head of the monastery and then rose to the cardinalate and the papacy. He granted Ireland to Henry II king of England; forced Frederick Barbarossa to kiss his foot; and almost forced that great emperor to recognize the right of the popes to bestow thrones. When Hadrian died, the majority of the cardinals elected Alexander III as pope, while the minority supported Victor IV. Barbarossa, imagining that he could once again renew the power of the German emperors over the papal institution, invited both to present their claims in his presence. Alexander refused to accept such a proposal, but Victor accepted the emperor’s invitation, for which reason at the Synod of Pavia (1160) Barbarossa declared Victor the legitimate pope. Alexander excommunicated Frederick, instructed the subjects of the emperor that they were free to disobey his government’s orders, and fanned the flames of revolt in Lombardy. The victory of the Lombard League at Legnano (1176) humiliated Frederick. He made peace with Alexander in Venice and once again kissed the pope’s foot. It was this Alexander who forced Henry II king of England to travel barefoot to the tomb of Thomas à Becket and there be whipped by the custodians of Canterbury. The long struggle and complete victory of Alexander paved the way for one of the greatest popes in history.

Innocent III was born in 1161 in Anagni near the city of Rome. His name was Lothario di Conti and he was the son of Count Segni; thus he was born into a family that enjoyed all the advantages of an aristocratic life and the blood of the best scholars and thinkers. Innocent studied philosophy and theology in Paris and then learned canon law and civil law in Bologna, and when he returned to Rome, because of his skill in diplomacy and religious principles, he quickly rose through the ecclesiastical ranks along with his influential relatives. At the age of thirty he attained the rank of deacon, and at thirty-seven, although he had not yet been officially ordained a priest, he was elected pope without any opposition (1198). One day the ordination ceremony was performed for him, and the next day he was promoted and attained the papacy. Innocent’s fortune was high, because the emperor Henry VI, who had brought southern Italy and Sicily under his control, died in 1197, and his successor was his three-year-old child Frederick II. Innocent took full advantage of this opportunity, meaning that he removed the German chief of police of the city of Rome from his position, expelled the German feudal lords from Spoleto and Perugia, accepted the obedience of Tuscany, established papal rule in all the provinces that belonged to the Church of Rome, was recognized as the feudal lord of the Two Sicilies by the widow of Henry, and agreed to be the guardian of the three-year-old child Henry. Within ten months Innocent had made himself the master of Italy.

According to existing documents he was the foremost thinker of his age. At the age of thirty-two or thirty-three he wrote four books on theological sciences that have all been described as scholarly and eloquent works, but these compositions were overshadowed by the brilliant political fame of Innocent. His fatwas in the papacy all indicate a logical and clear mind; his phrases are sharp and to the point, so that if he had not become a famous pope he could have been a brilliant Aquinas or an original Abelard. Despite his small stature, his dark and stern face and sharp eyes intimidated those present. Nevertheless Innocent was not without a sense of humor. He sang well and had a poetic nature. In the midst of severity he was a compassionate man and could be kind, patient, and personally tolerant. But in religious principles and morals he by no means allowed anyone to deviate even slightly from the determined and prescribed policy of the Church.

The world of Christian hope and faith was an empire whose protection he was charged with, and like every king he was ready, when words did not work, to take up the sword to protect his realm. At the same time that he was born into a wealthy family, he was content with the simple life of a philosopher. In an age when the love of amassing wealth was common, he remained an incorruptible man. Immediately after his ordination he strictly instructed the members of his court not to demand any payment from the people for their services. He loved the papal treasury to be filled with the wealth of the world, but he spent those funds with relative honesty and sincerity. Innocent was a complete diplomat and, to some extent like all members of that profession, was an unwilling partner in immoral acts. It was as if eleven centuries had completely vanished from existence and he had become one of the Roman emperors; it was as if he were a Stoic rather than a Christian; it was as if he had no doubt that ruling the world was his undeniable right.

Since the memory of many powerful popes was still alive and bright in the minds of the people of Rome, it was natural that Innocent should base his policies on the respect and majesty of proclaiming his mission. He precisely preserved the pomp and splendor of papal ceremonies and never in public diminished even a particle of his imperial dignity. Since, following the common opinions of the age, he sincerely considered himself the heir to the powers that the Son of God had granted to the apostles and the Church, it was obvious that he could not consider anyone equal to himself in power.

He said: “God not only entrusted the government of the followers of the Church but also the rule of the entire world to Peter.” He did not claim absolute worldly powers or purely non-religious affairs anywhere except the Papal States, but he insisted that wherever there is a conflict between religious affairs and secular powers, spiritual powers should take precedence over non-religious power, just as the sun has superiority over the moon. The ultimate goal and ideal of Innocent, like Gregory VII, was that all governments of the world should participate in a global governmental institution in which the pope would have supreme presidency in all matters related to justice, morals, and faith, and for a few years he almost succeeded in providing the conditions for the realization of that ideal.

In 1204, as a result of the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders, part of Innocent’s plan was realized, meaning that the Greek Church submitted to the bishop of Rome, and Innocent was able to speak with joy of the “seamless garment of Christ.” He brought Serbia and even the faraway land of Armenia under the control of the Roman Church’s realm. Gradually he was able to supervise the appointment and installation of persons in ecclesiastical positions and turn the domains of powerful bishops into tools and instruments for the execution of the intentions of the papal institution. As a result of a series of astonishing vital struggles, he forced the powerful kings of Europe in an unprecedented way to accept the recognition of his sovereignty. His policies in Italy were far less effective than in other places, meaning that with continuous effort he was unable to end the wars between the city-states of Italy; his political enemies in Rome made life so uncomfortable for him that for a while he was forced to abandon his capital. Sverre, king of Norway, victoriously resisted him despite the sentence of excommunication and prohibition of religious ceremonies. Philip II, king of France, paid no attention to his order regarding peace with England, but submitted to the insistence of the pope and recalled his estranged wife. Alfonso IX, king of León, who had married Berengaria, one of his relatives, contrary to the rules of religion, was forced to abandon his wife because of the pope’s opposition. Portugal, Aragon, and Hungary all declared themselves fiefs of the pope, put the yoke of his servitude on their necks, and every year sent him tribute. When John, king of England, opposed the appointment of Langton as archbishop of Canterbury by the pope, Innocent with a clever prohibition order and diplomacy forced John to present England as one of the papal fiefs to him.

Innocent expanded his power in Germany by supporting Otto IV against Philip of Swabia, then by supporting Philip against Otto, and later by supporting Otto against Frederick II, and subsequently by supporting Frederick against Otto, and in each of these cases the reward that the pope demanded in return for his support was to gain great privileges and to free the Papal States from the danger of siege. He reminded the emperors that a pope was responsible for “transferring” the power of the empire from the Greeks to the Frankish people; only a pope had crowned Charlemagne and called him emperor; and finally he noted that the popes could take back what they had given. A Byzantine who visited Rome in this period described Innocent as “not the successor of Peter, but the deputy of Constantine.”

Innocent rejected all the efforts that secular governments made to tax Christian priests without the permission of the pope. He allocated a special stipend from the papal treasury for needy priests and made great efforts to raise the level of literacy and knowledge of the clergy. He elevated the social status of the clergy by defining the Church not as the vast population of all the faithful but as the assembly of all Christian clergy. He disapproved of the actions of bishops and monasteries that took the local tithes from the parish priest and confiscated them for the benefit of their own domain or monastery. To reform the negligence of the monasteries he ordered papal inspectors to regularly visit monasteries and nunneries and supervise the movements of monks and nuns. The regulations he established organized the tangled relations of clergy and laity, and the relations between priest and bishop, and bishop and pope, and turned the papal court into a diligent and capable institution for consultation on the administration of affairs and the issuance of fatwas; this court under the leadership of Innocent became the most efficient governmental apparatus of its age; the method of work and reforms of this court helped to create the art and mysteries of diplomacy. Innocent himself was probably the foremost jurist of his age and could confirm every decision he made with the help of judicial precedents and logical arguments. Jurists and scholars mostly flocked to the “court,” that is, the supreme ecclesiastical court that was formed under his supervision and a committee of cardinals, to benefit from its debates and fatwas on points of civil or religious law.

Some called him “the father of law,” and others from affection and humor called him Solomon.

His highest achievement as a legislator and pope was presiding over the Fourth Lateran Council that was held in 1215 at the Church of St. John the Baptist in the Lateran, near the city of Rome. In this general church council, which was the twelfth of its kind in Christian history, one thousand five hundred heads of monasteries, bishops, archbishops, primates, and representatives from all important nations of a united Christian world participated. The opening speech of the pope in this council was a fearless confession that at the same time tested the zeal of the clergy: “The source of the corruption of the people lies among the clergy. From here the corruptions of the Christian world arise: faith takes the path of corruption, religion is ruined, justice is trampled, heretics increase, schismatics become bold, unbelievers gain strength, and the Saracens achieve victory.” In this assembly all the powerful figures and wise men of the Church who were present placed themselves entirely at the disposal of one individual. His fatwas became the decrees of the religious council. Such a weighty assembly allowed him to redefine the principles of religion. Now for the first time the opinions regarding transubstantiation were officially defined. The assembly with full enthusiasm accepted his invitation for a war against the Albigensian heretics, but at the same time, following Innocent, became aware of the shortcomings and defects of the work of the Church.

The Lateran Council condemned the sale of objects that were falsely considered relics of the saints and strongly disapproved of “the imprudent and excessive actions of some bishops who have not hesitated to grant indulgences and in this way have made the power of the Church worthy of humiliation and have destroyed the effect of atonement.” The assembly attempted to reform the lives of monks and the condition of monasteries from the root. It prohibited drunkenness, immorality, and priests taking concubines and prescribed severe punishments for offenders, but it rejected the Albigensian heresy that claimed that any kind of sexual act is a sin. In terms of the number of participants, the topics discussed, and the effects that resulted from the decisions of the Lateran Council, this was the most important religious assembly that had been held since the Council of Nicaea.

Innocent quickly fell from the height of his power to an untimely death. He was so tirelessly burdened with the management and expansion of his administrative affairs that at the age of fifty-five he was completely exhausted.

About this stage of his life he wrote with regret: “No leisure has remained for me to think about things above worldly affairs. I can hardly breathe. I must live for others to such an extent that I am almost a stranger to myself.” Perhaps Innocent in the last year of his life viewed his works more realistically than when he was in the heat of struggle. The Crusades that he had prepared for the reconquest of Palestine had not achieved any result.

Whoever came after him to sit on the papal throne was inevitably forced to suppress the Albigensian crowd in southern France with full intensity. Innocent had undertaken works on the basis of which his contemporaries praised his personal successes, but there was no news of the love and affection that people had for Gregory I or Leo IX. Some clergy complained that he resembled a king more than a priest. St. Lutgardis thought that between Innocent and the fire of hell there was only a thin veil; and the Church itself, although it prided itself on his innate genius and was grateful for his efforts, did not count him among the saints, while it had called people saints who were far lower in importance and rank than Innocent and showed more scruples in following moral principles.

Nevertheless, it must not be denied that as a result of his efforts the Church reached the highest peak of its power and arrived at a place where it was close to realizing the long-standing ambitions of religious leaders to create a global spiritual country. He was the most capable statesman of his age. In carrying out his intentions and achieving his goals he had insight, sacrifice, flexible perseverance, and an unbelievable power. When Innocent left the world (1216), the Church in organization, splendor, and good name had reached a peak and power that it had never had before and after that only rarely and for a short time enjoyed such greatness.

Honorius III does not hold a very honorable place in the merciless pages of history, because he was kinder than to be able to manage the war between the empire and the papal institution with full intensity. Gregory IX, although he reached the papacy at the age of eighty, fought with an almost fanatical stubbornness; his struggle with Frederick II was so victorious that it delayed the Renaissance by a hundred years; and it was he who formed the Inquisition. With all this, he was also a man of undoubtedly sincere belief and one who sacrificed himself for his beliefs, who rose in defense of what in his view was the most precious possession of humanity—namely the faith of Jesus.

Gregory was in fact not a harsh and strict man, as when he was a cardinal he took Francis, who was probably a heretic, under his protection and wisely guided him to the right path. Innocent IV destroyed Frederick II and allowed the Inquisition to use torture. He was a good patron of philosophers, helped universities and founded several law schools. Alexander IV was a peaceful, kind, merciful, and just man who “astonished the world by his lack of tyranny.” He showed no inclination for the warlike qualities of his predecessors. He preferred piety to politics and, according to a Franciscan chronicler, “because he witnessed the terrible and increasing struggles between Christians every day, he died heartbroken from the world.” Clement IV restarted the old struggle, prepared the conditions for the defeat of Manfred, and brought the Hohenstaufen dynasty and the German Empire to the dust. The reconquest of Constantinople by the Greeks endangered the agreement that had been reached between the Greek and Roman Churches. But Gregory X, by opposing the ambitions of Charles of Anjou to conquer the Byzantine Empire, made Michael Palaiologos indebted to him. The Greek emperor, who in this way had escaped a great danger, made the Eastern Church obedient to the Roman Church, and the papal institution once again became unrivaled.

VIII – The Incomes of the Church

A Church that in reality ruled over a vast unified kingdom in Europe and dealt effectively with the worship, morals, culture, marriage, wars, Crusades, deaths, and wills of the populations of half a continent and participated effectively in the administration of the non-religious affairs of the nations and had created the most expensive organizations in medieval history could only continue its duties if it had income from a hundred different sources.

The most important source of the Church’s income was the tithe, meaning that after Charlemagne all Christian lands of the Latin rite were obliged by state laws to hand over one-tenth of their products or non-specific income, in kind or in cash, to the local church. After the tenth century the parish of every priest was necessarily obliged to hand over part of its tithes to the bishop of the section to which it was subject. Under the influence of feudal ideas and opinions, the tithes of a priest’s domain could be transferred to others like any type of property and income, on condition of a specific service, pawned, donated, or sold; so that until the twelfth century the tangled financial fabric of every parish had reached a point where the local church and the priest’s work was more the collection of tithes than the expenditure of that income for the necessary uses of that place. It was the duty of the priest that if he saw that someone was evading the tithe incomes or presenting a false account of his incomes to escape giving the Church’s right, he should excommunicate the offender or, as the English say, “curse him for his tithes.” Although the people of that age considered the duties of the Church very necessary for their otherworldly salvation, they were reluctant to pay the tithe, just as people today are reluctant to pay taxes to the government. In medieval history we sometimes come across mentions of riots and revolts whose cause was this disgust of the people from giving the Church’s tithes, for example the monk chronicler Salimbene describes that in 1280 the people of Reggio Emilia, despite the sentence of excommunication and prohibition, allied “that no one should pay tithes to the priests … or sit at the table with them … and refrain from giving them food and drink.” In this case it was the people who in reality excommunicated the priests, and their sentence was so effective that the bishop of that region was forced to make peace.

The basic income of the Church was from the lands that the Church itself owned. These lands had been acquired by the Church through gifts or donations, through purchase or seizure of the properties of debtors, or through the revival of wasteland by the efforts of monastery monks or other religious groups. In the feudal system it was expected that every owner or tenant would donate something to the Church upon death. People who refrained from giving such gifts were suspected of heresy and might not be buried in the consecrated lands of the Church. Since only a few of the common people were literate, usually whenever someone intended to write a will he sent for a priest. Pope Alexander III ruled in 1170 that the will of no one should be legal and valid unless it was written in the presence of a priest. Any non-clerical scribe who set about drafting a will contrary to this instruction was deserving of excommunication, and the certification of the validity of wills or confirmation of their legality was among the special powers of the Church. People believed that giving gifts and donating their property according to the will to the Church was the surest means to alleviate the torments of the purgatorial stage. Many of the people’s donation letters to the Church, especially before the year one thousand, began with these words: “Since the evening of the world is near.” Some of the wealthy, as we previously discussed in the Crusades, sold their lands cheaply to the Church to prepare funds—in these kinds of cases the Church usually took care of the mortgagor during illness or old age, and when he died the Church took possession of the property without its conscience being occupied about the mortgage. Some monasteries accepted the wealthy into the “brotherhood” of their monks and promised that through the blessing of the prayers and good works of the monastery dwellers a little of the otherworldly reward would be their share, or that the sufferings of their purgatorial stage would be reduced. The Crusaders not only sold lands cheaply to the Church to prepare funds but also deposited their properties as pledges with the religious authorities and borrowed sums, and since in most cases they were unable to pay their debt, they were deprived of the right of ownership. Some childless people when they died bequeathed all their property to the Church. A prominent example of this group was Matilda, countess of Tuscany, who attempted to donate almost one-fourth of the soil of Italy to the Church.

The properties of the Church, since they were inalienable and naturally before the year 1200 were not subject to the taxes of secular authorities, increased century by century. For a cathedral, a monastery, or a nunnery it was not unusual to have several thousand lordly villages that included ten to twelve small towns or even one or two large prosperous cities. The bishop of Langres owned the entire province; the monastery of St. Martin in Tours had more than twenty thousand serfs in its possession; the bishop of Bologna had about two thousand lordly villages; and the property of the monastery of Lorsch was also of the same size; the monastery of Las Huelgas in Spain owned sixty-four cities. Around the year 1200 in Castile in Spain the Church possessed one-fourth of the lands of the region; in England the lands belonging to the Church were one-fifth of the kingdom, in Germany they amounted to one-third, and in Livonia they reached half of the total lands. These figures are of course inaccurate and estimated about whose accuracy one cannot speak with certainty. The accumulation of such properties under the hand of the Church made that institution envied and the target of the arrows of the government. Charles Martel confiscated the properties of the Church for the preparation of his wars; Louis the Pious, by approving laws, prevented the Church from being able to, through accepting donations, deprive the children of the testator of the right of inheritance. Henry II, king of Germany, confiscated the lands of many monasteries because he claimed that the monks had bound themselves by oath to live in poverty; and in England, with the approval of several laws related to endowments, the transfer of lands to ecclesiastical institutions was limited. Edward, king of England, in 1291 took one-tenth of the property of the Church of the kingdom as tax from the hands of the clergy and in 1294 confiscated half of the incomes of that institution. In France the imposition of tax on the properties of the Church was begun by Philip II, continued by St. Louis, and made a fixed rule by Philip the Fair. As soon as the market of industry and commerce prospered, money increased and prices rose; the income of the monasteries and episcopal dioceses, which mostly came from feudal dues, since they had previously been determined at low rates and now it was impossible to keep pace with the new prices, not only was no longer sufficient for a luxurious life but was not even enough for a subsistence life. Until 1270 most of the cathedrals of France owed large sums. The administrators of these kinds of cathedrals, to pay the dues and taxes that the kings demanded, were forced to borrow sums with exorbitant interest from moneylenders, and to some extent for this reason at the end of the thirteenth century the building of churches and monasteries declined.

The popes also, initially by taxing the lands and incomes of the bishops for the preparation of the Crusades and then by apportioning the ever-increasing expenses of the papal realm, emptied the episcopal treasuries day by day. As the scope of operations of the papal governmental institution became wider and its duties more complicated, the creation of new sources for central incomes became necessary. Innocent III (1199) instructed all bishops that every year they should send one-fourth of their incomes to the papal treasury in Rome. All monasteries, nunneries, and churches that were directly under the protection of the popes were taxed. Every priest who was appointed by the popes to the episcopal position of a region was obliged to deliver nominally the income of the first year and in reality all the income of six months of his domain as the right of installation to the new position to the pope. Everyone who was appointed to the position of archbishop was obliged to deliver large sums to the papal treasury for assuming the new position. All Christian families were obliged to send one penny (equivalent to 90 American cents) every year to the papal court as “Peter’s penny.” Usually the expenses that belonged to legal disputes were taken by the applicants to the papal court.

In some cases where the marriage of kings with their relatives, for some political reasons, was considered appropriate and necessary and deviation from canon law became necessary, the popes reserved the right for themselves to, in exchange for receiving sums for examining such legal cases, absolve the parties from the bonds of religious law. Large sums were obtained through the sale of indulgences and from the generosity of Christian pilgrims who came to the city of Rome. According to calculations, the total incomes of the papal treasury around the year 1250 were far greater than the revenues of all the non-religious governments of Europe. In the year 1252 the funds that the papal government received from England were three times all the revenues of the treasury of the king of England.

The wealth of the Church, although proportionate to the extent of the duties and obligations of such an institution, became the main cause of the heresies of this age. Arnold of Brescia declared that every priest or monk who left any property after death would certainly go to hell. The Bogomils, Waldensians, Patarenes, and Cathars all, by denouncing the wealth of the followers of Christ, helped the progress and exaltation of their movement.

One of the famous jokes of the thirteenth century was the “Gospel of Silver Mark” that began with these phrases: “In those days the pope said to the Romans: (When the Son of Man comes to our august presence, before anything else tell him: ‘O friend, from where do you come to this court?’ and if he gives you no answer, cast him into outer darkness.”) Throughout all the literary works of this age—in the fabliaux, chansons de geste, in the Romance of the Rose, the poems of the wandering scholars, the troubadours, Dante, and even in the works of monk chroniclers—we encounter complaints about the greed and wealth-amassing of the clergy. Matthew Paris, who was an English monk, condemned the baseness of the English and Roman bishops and wrote that these people “with difficulty make a living from the endowments of Christ.” Hubert de Roman, prior of the Dominican order, described pardoners who “with bribes corrupt the chief judges of the ecclesiastical courts.” A priest named Petrus Cantor told of priests who sold the Mass or the evening prayer. Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, openly spoke in condemnation of the buying and selling of the papal court of justice and said that he himself had heard Henry II boast that all the members of the college of cardinals were his servants. In all history every government has been accused of bribery and corruption; such accusations are almost always to some extent true and to some extent the result of exaggeration and overstatement about cases that have frightened people; but sometimes these kinds of exaggerations accumulate and appear in the form of a revolutionary disgust. The same devout people who piled up their pennies and set about building churches for the Virgin Mary were able to raise their voices in opposition to the communal tendencies of the Church and sometimes bring a stubborn priest to the dust of destruction.

The Church itself joined hands with the people in opposing greedy and money-loving clergy and made great efforts to reduce these kinds of natural abuses. Hundreds of clergy, from St. Peter Damian, St. Bernard, St. Francis, and Cardinal de Vitry to ordinary monks, endured hardships to reduce these kinds of abuses. Most of the information we now have about the unseemly behavior of the clergy of that age we have taken from the writings of these great reformers of the Church. A dozen or so different orders of monks devoted themselves to being an example to others with their good works and in this way reminded their fellow believers of the need for reforms. Pope Alexander III and the Third Lateran Council (1179) condemned and prohibited extortion for performing baptism or extreme unction or performing the marriage sermon. The purpose of Gregory X in convening the general council of the Church in Lyon in 1274 was specifically to take measures for the reform of the Church. The popes themselves in this age showed no inclination for luxury and devoted all their efforts to performing hard duties and passed their days in this way. The problem lies in the fact that spiritual affairs if not organized become weak, and when they become weak, they become defiled by the material needs of those organizations.