Rise and rot of Papal power
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Seven
The Hegemony of the Papacy and of France in the Thirteenth Century
Chapter I
The Papacy and the Church
1. The Situation of the Papacy in the 13th Century
p291 ...Neither the humiliation of Henry IV at Canossa, nor that of Frederick Barbarossa at Venice, nor that of Otto IV at Bouvines, was the humiliation of the civil power before priestly arrogance. In reality, the conflict was not a conflict between State and Church: it was an intestine struggle within the Church itself. What the Emperors wanted was to compel the Popes to recognize them as governing the universal Church... Their pretensions thus imperiled, in every country, that temporal independence of which, by the strangest of confusions, they had been regarded as the defenders. The cause of the Pope was the cause of the nation, and with the liberty of the Church was bound the liberty of the European States; to such an extent that the victory of Philip Augustus at Bouvines was the triumph of both causes.
p292 ...the collapse of Otto IV did not mean the end of the Empire... Yet we may say that from the beginning of the 13th century the historic role of the Empire was finished. It ceased to exist as a universal power, as a European authority... they [the later Emperors] were actually merely the sovereigns, or to speak more exactly, the suzerains, of the medley of principalities and municipal republics constituted by the Germany of the late Middle Ages and the modern epoch, and which from the 14th century onwards was known as the "Holy Roman Empire of the German nations."
After the fall of the Empire only one universal power was left in Europe: that of the Pope...The whole government of the Church depended on the Pope... All the bishops now swore fealty to the Pope; no religious order could be founded without his authorization... The canon law, whose most ancient monument, the Decree of Gratianus, was proclaimed in Rome in 1150, was rapidly enlarged under those great jurists, Innocent III and Innocent IV. By the end of the 13th century it was complete... [Discussion of the various taxes throughout Europe that funded the Pope] It was these taxes that constituted the treasury of the Holy See, and enabled it to play the universal role which was allotted to it: to subsidize the Crusades, to maintain the missions, and to add to its spiritual influence the purely worldly influence of gold... On the other hand, it must be noted that this financial power, which was nourished and maintained by the Catholic hierarchy in every part of Europe, was made possible only by the economic progress due to the revival of trade... when the circulation of money was an accomplished fact, when it was replacing, more and more completely, the system of revenues in kind, the fiscal system of the pontiff was free to develop within the extreme limits of the pontifical authority... they [pontifical taxes] are the consequence of the economic transformation which was at the same time beginning to render possible a regular system of taxation in the various States. And it is interesting to see how the Pope took advantage... of the capitalist organization which was beginning to evolve in the great Italian communes. The men whom he entrusted with the collection and transmission of his revenues were merchants, the bankers of Siena, and afterwards those of Florence. The Popes, even earlier than the lay sovereigns, were in intimate relations with the financiers, and the fact that the latter had to collect their revenues in all parts of Europe, convert them by exchange into Italian or international money, and place them at the Pope's disposal, without the necessity of transporting them, at the cost of great expense and danger, across mountains, contributed in no small degree to the origin of the first banking operations and the first letters of credit, the most remote ancestors of our bills of exchange... Like ecclesiastical law, theology was essentially an achievement of the 13th century. The scholastic philosophy of the previous centuries finds its climax in the Summa of St Thomas (1274), in which Christian morality and the Christian dogmas are expounded in accordance with the Aristotelian method.
p294 ...men no longer sought to attain salvation through mysticism, through immediate contact with God. Everywhere the Church interposed... What men were now seeking to achieve was the government of their souls by the Church, itself governed by the Vicar of Jesus Christ. And these souls were accepted in the bodies which they animated; which is to say, that society was accepted; heroism was not required of it, nor were men expected to desert the world. They had only to obey the Church, and allow it to lead them to salvation. Every human being, every profession was subject to the Church, and therefore to the Roman pontiff... All those who had received baptism belonged to the Church, and had to bow to its teachings, under penalty of penitence, or excommunication, or, in case of need, of taking part in a Crusade. Here was a majestic unity, a complete doctrine, which imposed itself upon a world of believers, all of whom accepted it...
p296 At the moment when the Church... had arrived at this summit of power... a new adversary rose up against it: heresy. Since the Arian heresy, which the Goths had brought from the East in the 4th century, the Latin Catholic world, for many centuries, had unanimously professed the same faith, and acknowledged the same dogmas, presenting a notable contrast... to the religious disputes which, down to the 10th century, had never ceased to trouble the Greek Church... In the West... there was no philosophical tradition, no learning outside the ranks of the clergy; there was no contacts with civilizations professing different religions, no social conditions liable to direct men's minds toward dangerous innovations. How could faith have been disputed, in a society living in isolation... and in which the Church, the only literate body in the midst of universal ignorance, knew no other literature than the Latin -- that is, a completely orthodox literature? The 1th century, which saw the rise of the revival of commerce, the development of navigation, and the rise of the first cities, was also to see the first symptoms of restlessness appear in religious life. ...the Manichaean doctrines were trickling in from the East -- into Lombardy, and from Lombardy into France and Rhenish Germany. Few at first, their adepts became more numerous in the course of the 12th century, and... were concentrated more especially in the County of Toulouse and the region of Albi, whence their name of Albigenses. Even more mystical and ascetic than their orthodox contemporaries, they went so far as to reject in the name of the Spirit, the sole principle of life and truth, not only society, but the Church itself, corrupted as it was by wealth and power. In order to attain to Christ, whose only disciples they declared themselves to be, a man must divest himself of the whole terrestrial nature, arriving at a state of perfect purity. Hence their name of Cathars... [the "pure ones"] as greatly dreaded and abhorred in the 12th century as the name of Anabaptists was in the 16th, and from which is derived the word that denotes the heretic in the Germanic languages (Ketzer, Ketter). Like the Anabaptists, moreover, these visionaries menaced both the social and the religious order. They preached both the community of goods and the annihilation of the Church... Between 1208 and 1235 they were hunted down and exterminated in every part of Languedoc... [a Crusade preached by Innocent III] Until the appearance of Wycliffe nearly all the heretical sects -- Apostolics, Brothers of the Free Spirit, Begards, etc. -- the Waldenses alone excepted -- seem to have had some fundamental relation with the Cathar mysticism... The radicalism of their aspirations could never be realized in practice, and everywhere it excited the hostility of the social authorities. It was among the proletariat of the cities that they recruited most of their adherents; and this explains both the naivety of their communistic dreams and -- except for certain moments of crisis -- their somewhat restricted diffusion. Save in a few of the great industrial cities, the proletarian workers constituted only a very small minority of the bourgeoisie. The great majority of the bourgeois consisted of small employers, master craftsmen, etc.; in short, that middle class which is as hostile to capitalism as it is to communism.
p297 ...from the end of the 12th century the Church employed every means of persecuting and opposing heresy. It tolerated the Jews because they were outside the Church; but it could not tolerate heretics... If they refused to adjure their doctrines it cut them off from its communion; then, having passed its capital sentence on the soul, it delivered them to the secular power, which undertook to destroy the body... Before the 12th century we find... in the upper ranks of the clergy, the expression of doubts as to the legitimacy of inflicting the sentence of death on heretics. But no such doubts recurred after Innocent III had ascended the Papal throne... Orthodoxy, having become a body of doctrine which was imposed on all men and on all their activities, could no longer tolerate dissidence, and every individual opinion, every deviation from the norm, became a crime. The Order of the Dominicans, founded in 1216, devoted itself especially to the examination and persecution of heretics. Side by side with the ancient episcopal Inquisition there now appeared the pontifical Inquisition created by Gregory IX in 1233, a kind of universal police whose function it was to watch over the safety of dogma. ...anyone who placed himself outside the Church was regarded as a criminal. Did not the kings hold their power from God, and were they not the protectors of the Church?
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