The Middle Ages: A Very Short Introduction by Miri Rubin

Author:Miri Rubin [Rubin, Miri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199697298
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Church in search of liberty

With the growth of the European economy and the decline of the frequency of disruptive invasions, a more integrated Europe was emerging soon after the year 1000. Recent conversion had brought Iceland as well as Bohemia into the religious and dynastic fold of Europe, Poland as well as Denmark. Migration from the more densely settled west to the east meant that intensive agrarian methods were spread, so more plentiful foodstuff was grown to support growing populations. In many of these activities ecclesiastical institutions—monasteries above all—led the way: they were a relatively stable presence, endowed by members of local elites, and home to recruits from those classes too. Monasteries were sometimes vanguards of political and economic power: when Guifred, Count of Urgel repopulated Catalonia in the late 9th century, he did so with monasteries planted in the plain of Urgel.

Bishops led their surrounding diocese from churches that came to be known as cathedrals, after the bishop’s throne—cathedra. Most European cities had a baptismal church where the lives of local people became Christian. The most prominent cities—old Roman civitates, hence the word city—served as administrative centres for ecclesiastical and secular affairs. Even as other churches and chapels were built at the tombs of saints, these existed in subordination to the baptismal church, the city’s mother church.

Despite the influence of religious houses, the occasional support of landed families, and the sporadic inspiration of holy people, provision in the countryside was patchy, and until the 12th century bore little uniformity across Europe. Aristocratic households had their domestic chaplains, and their members were able to found monasteries and nunneries. Landlords built churches on their estates for their dependants; they appointed priests and furnished the needs of the altar. Bishops played an important role in offering centres for training of the clergy in cathedral schools. Before 1000 it was still possible for married men to become priests and to maintain their families.

However far it may have seemed from some of Europe’s provinces, Rome was an unrivalled Christian centre. Imperial symbolism was still palpable in the rituals of the papacy: vestments, chant, and titles. Popes promoted not only local Roman saints—the martyrs Peter and Paul, Nereus and Achileus—but also the cult of the Virgin Mary, which had developed early and vigorously in Constantinople. In Rome, Charlemagne sought to be crowned in the year 800. Later German kings sought elevation there too. It was indeed such a Holy Roman Emperor—Henry III (1017–56)—who encouraged the conception of the Church in the world as a hierarchical bureaucratic structure with the pope as its head. Popes—as bishops of the unique city of Rome and vicars of Christ on earth—invested bishops with their office and authority, and these in turn supervised the diocese and all its believers like good shepherds. Or so was the ideal.

The vision now emanating from Rome was one of Church hierarchy and discipline, and of freedom from secular powers—libertas ecclesiae, freedom of the Church. Similar ideas had been expressed earlier in the century

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