). The Consolidation of the Papal Monarchy

To understand the origins and appreciate the significance of the western European religious revival of the High Middle Ages it is necessary to have some idea of the level to which religion had sunk in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. With the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, religious decentralization and ensuing corruption prevailed throughout most of Europe. Most churches and monasteries became the private property of strong local lords. The latter disposed of Church offices under their control as they wished, often by selling them or by granting them to close relatives.

Once Europe began to catch its breath from the wave of external invasions that peaked in the tenth century , the wide extent of religious corruption or indifference was bound to call forth some reaction. Bishops could do little to effect change because most archbishops and bishops were unable to disentangle themselves from the political affairs of their day. The first successful measures of reform were taken in the monasteries because monasteries could be somewhat more independent and count more on the support of their reforms by lay lords. The movement for monastic reform began with the foundation of the monastery of Cluny in Burgundy in 910 by a pious nobleman. Around the middle of the eleventh century, after so many monasteries had been taken out the control of secular authorities, the leaders of the monastic reform movement started to lobby for the reform of the clerical hierarchy as well. They centered their attacks upon simony – i.e., the buying and selling of positions in the Church.

A new and most momentous phase in the history of the reform movement was initiated during the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073-1085). He was not only more zealous in trying to enforce some new decrees, but he brought with him a basically new conception of the role of the Church in human life. Gregory VII conceived of Christianity as being much more activist and believed that the Church was responsible for creating “right order in the world.” Equally important, he thought of kings and emperors as his inferiors. Gregory III’s successors and most of the popes of the twelfth century were fully committed to the goal of papal monarchy. But they were far less impetuous than Gregory had been and were more interested in the everyday administration of the Church.

The emergence and success of the papal monarchy in the High Middle Ages had several beneficial effects during the course of that period. One was that the international rule of the papacy over the Church enhanced international communications and uniformity of religious practices. Another was that the papal cultivation of canon law aided a growing respect for law of all sorts and often helped protect the causes of otherwise defenseless subjects, like widows and orphans. The popes also managed to achieve some success in their campaigns to eliminate the sale of Church offices and to raise the morals of the clergy. There was of course corruption in the papal government too, but in an age of entrenched localism the triumph of an international force was mainly beneficial. Finally, as we will see later, the growth of the papal monarchy helped bring vitality to popular religion and helped support the revival of learning.
4). The Crusades

The rise and fall of the crusading movement was closely related to the fortunes of the high-medieval papal monarchy. The First Crusade was initiated by the papacy, and its success was a great early victory for the papal monarchy. But the later decline of the crusading movement helped undermine the pope’s temporal authority. Thus the Crusades can be seen as part of a chapter in papal and religious history. In addition, the Crusades opened the first chapter in the history of Western colonialism.

The immediate cause of the First Crusade was an appeal for aid in 1095 by the Byzantine Emperor Alexius Comnenus. Alexius hoped to reconquer Byzantine territory in Asia Minor which had recently been lost to the Turks. He asked the pope to help rally some Western military support. But the emperor soon found that he was receiving not just simple aid but a crusade, the West sent forth an enormous army of volunteers whose goal was to wrest Jerusalem away from Islam. Since the decision to turn Alexiu’s call for aid into a crusade was made by the pope, it is well to examine the latter’s motives.

Certainly there were economic and political reasons. Many of the poorer people who went crusading came from overpopulated areas: these Crusaders may have hoped to do better for themselves in the East than they could on their crowded lands. Similarly, some lords were feeling the pressures of growing political stability and a growing acceptance of primogeniture. Hitherto younger sons might have hoped to make their own fortune in endemic warfare, or at least inherit a small piece of territory for themselves. Clearly, leaving for the East was an attractive alternative to chafing at home.

But the dominant motive for going on the First Crusade was definitely religious. Nobody could have gone crusading out of purely calculating motives because nobody could have predicted for certain that new lands would be won. But the journey offered great solace for the Christian soul. For centuries pilgrimages had been the most popular type of Christian penance, and the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was considered to be the most sacred and efficacious one of all. Obviously the greatest of all spiritual rewards would come from going on an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem in order to win back the holiest of sacred places for Christianity. All Crusaders would be entirely freed form otherworldly punishments in purgatory and that their souls would go straight to heaven if they died on the Crusade. As they flocked together they were further whipped up by preachers into a religious frenzy that approached mass hysteria. They were convinced that they had been chosen to cleanse the world of unbelievers. One terrible consequence was that even before they had fully set out for the East they started slaughtering European Jews in the first really virulent outbreak of Western anti-Semitism.

Against great odds the First Crusade was a thorough success. In 1099 the Crusaders took Jerusalem. Their success came mainly from the facts that their Muslim opponents just at that time were internally divided and that the appearance of the strange, uncouth, and terribly savage westerners took the Muslims by surprise. From the start the Crusaders in the Holy Land acted like imperialists. As soon as they conquered new territories they claimed them as property for themselves. They also exulted in their own ferocity. When they conquered Jerusalem they ignored Christ’s own pacifistic precepts, mercilessly slaughtering all the Muslim inhabitants of the city. Those Crusaders who stayed on in the Holy Land gradually became more civilized and tolerant, but new waves of armed pilgrims from the West continued to act brutally. Moreover, even the settled Crusaders never became fully integrated with the local population but remained a separate, exploiting foreign element in the heart of the Islamic world.

The crusades left a complex and troubling legacy in world civilization. Between 1096 and 1272, waves of zealous and adventuresome European Christians set out to do battle with the Muslims. Eight main crusades were launched, each lasting from one to four years, except the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254), which dragged on longer. After terrible hardships, the crusaders succeeded in taking Jerusalem in 1099 and established a Latin Kingdom in Palestine. For over two centuries, bands of Western warriors went on armed pilgrimages to defend this precarious kingdom. The Second Crusade (1145-1149) ended in defeat and disaster. In 1187, the Muslim recaptured Jerusalem, causing the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the French King Philip Augustus, and the English King Richard the Lionhearted, to embark the Third Crusade (1187-1192). This Crusade also failed, but Richard signed a peace treaty with Saladin. The Fourth Crusade was an unprecedented disaster from the point of view of a united Christendom, the ultimate result was to help destroy the Byzantine Empire and open up eastern Europe to the Ottoman Turks. The Fifth Crusade was launched from the sea against Egypt in order to penetrate Muslim power at its base, but after a promising start it too was a failure. Only the Sixth Crusade, led from 1228 to 1229 by the Emperor Frederick II, was a success; Frederick did not fight but skillfully negotiated a treaty whereby Jerusalem and a narrow access route were restored to the Christians. But the Christians could not hold on to their gains and Jerusalem fell again in 1244, never to be recaptured by the West until 1917. The subsequent crusades accomplished little.

The victory of the First Crusade had greatly enhanced the prestige and strength of the papal monarchy, but the subsequent failures were increasingly calling into question the papal ability to unite the West for a great enterprise. Once the papacy launched its crusade against Frederick II and his heirs, however, it fully sacrificed the crusading ideal to political interests. It was then that the decline of the crusading movement and the decline of the papacy became most closely interrelated. By 1291 the last Christian outposts in the Holy Land had fallen without any Western help. So, while the crusading idea helped build up the papal monarchy, it also helped destroy it.

What practical significance did the Crusades have? On the credit side, the almost incredible success of the First Crusade greatly helped raise the self-confidence of the medieval West. For centuries western Europe had been on the defensive against Islam; now a Western army could march into a center of Islamic power and take a coveted prize seemingly at will. This dramatic victory contributed to making the twelfth century an age of extraordinary buoyancy and optimism. To Western Christians it must have seemed as if God was on their side and that they could accomplish almost anything they wished. The Crusades also helped broaden Western horizons. Few westerners in the Holy Land ever bothered to learn Arabic or profit from specific Islamic institutions or ideas, but Crusaders who traveled long distances through foreign lands were bound to become somewhat more sophisticated. The Crusades certainly stimulated interest in hitherto unknown luxury goods and presented a wealth of subjects for literature and fable.

From an economic point of view, the success of the First Crusade helped open up the eastern Mediterranean to Western commerce, helping to enhance Western prosperity as a whole. The need to transfer money over long distances also stimulated early experiments in banking techniques. Politically, the precedent of taxing the clergy for financing crusades was not only quickly turned to the advantage of the Western monarchies, it also stimulated the development of various forms of national taxation. More than that, the very act of organizing a country to help support a royal crusade by raising funds and provisions was an important stimulus to the development of efficient administrative institutions in the emerging nation-states.

But there was a debit as well as a credit side to the crusading balance sheet. There is no excusing the Crusaders’ savage butchery – of Jews at home and of Muslims abroad. The Crusades greatly accelerated the deterioration of Western relations with the Byzantine Empire and contributed fundamentally to the destruction of that realm, with all the disastrous consequences that followed. And Western colonialism in the Holy Land was only the beginning of a long history of colonialism that has continued until modern times.
5). The Outburst of Religious Vitality

The First Crusade would never have succeeded if westerners had not become enthusiastic about religion. The growth of that enthusiasm itself was a most remarkable development. Had the First Crusade been called about fifty years earlier it is doubtful that many people would have joined it. But the eleventh-century reform movement and the pontificate of Gregory VII awakened interest in religion in all quarters. Thereafter the entire high-medieval period was to be marked by extraordinary religious vitality.

The reformers and Gregory VII stimulated a European religious revival for two reasons. One was that the campaign to cleanse the Church actually achieved a large measure of success: the laity could now respect the clergy more and increasingly large numbers of people were inspired to join the clergy themselves. The other reason was that Gregory explicitly called upon the laity to help discipline their priests. After the Gregorian period Christianity was becoming an ideal and practice which really began to direct human lives. As more people were entering or patronizing new monasteries, the very nature of religious belief and devotion was changing. One of many examples was a shift away from the cult of saints to emphasis on the worship of Jesus and veneration of the Virgin Mary. As a result many developed an intense sense of identification with Christ and tried to imitate his life in different ways.

The significance of the new cult was manifold. For the first time a woman was given a central and honored place in the Christian religion. Moreover, this emphasis on Mary gave women a religious figure with whom they could identify, thereby enhancing their own religiosity. A third result was that artists and writers who portrayed Mary were able to concentrate on femininity and scenes of human tenderness and family life. This contributed greatly to a general softening of artistic and literary style. But perhaps most important of all, the rise of the cult of Mary was closely associated with a general rise of hopefulness and optimism in the twelfth-century West.

Sometimes the great religious enthusiasm of the twelfth century went beyond the bounds approved by the Church. As the twelfth century progressed and the papal monarchy concentrated on strengthening its legal and financial administration, some lay people began to wonder whether the Church, which had once been so inspiring, had not begun to lose sight of its idealistic goals. Another difficulty was that the growing emphasis on the miraculous powers of priests tended to inhibit the religious role of the laity and place it in a distinct position of spiritual inferiority. The result was that in the second half of the twelfth century large-scale movements of popular heresy swept over western Europe for the first time in its history.

The entire period from 1050 to 1300 was hence unquestionably a great “age of faith.” The products of this faith were both tangible and intangible. We will examine the tangible products – works of theology, literature, art, and architecture – presently. Great as these were, the intangible products were equally important. Until the Christian religion became deeply felt in the High Middle Ages hardly any common ideals inspired average men and women. Life in the Middle Ages was extraordinarily hard, and until about 1050 there was not much to give it meaning. Then, when people began to take Christianity more seriously, an impetus was provided for performing hard work of all sorts. As we have seen in the last chapter, Europeans after 1050 literally had better food than before, and now we have seen that they were better fed figuratively as well. With more spiritual as well as material nourishment they accomplished great feats in all forms of human endeavor.

The major intellectual accomplishments of the High Middle Ages were of four related but different sorts: the spread of primary education and literacy; the origin and spread of universities; the acquisition of classical and Islamic knowledge; and the actual progress in thought made by westerners. Any one of these accomplishments would have earned the High Middle Ages a signal place in the history of Western learning; taken together they began the era of Western intellectual predominance which became a hallmark of modern times.

Clearly, the economic revival, the growth of towns, and the emergence of strong government allowed Europeans to dedicate themselves to basic education as never before. The high-medieval educational boom was more than merely a growth of schools, for the nature of the schools changed, and as time went on so did the curriculum and the clientele. At first the cathedral schools existed almost exclusively for the basic training of priests. But soon after 1100 the curriculum was broadened, for the growth of both ecclesiastical and secular governments created a growing demand for trained officials. Above all, a thorough knowledge of Latin grammar and composition began to be inculcated, often by studying some of the Roman classics. The revived interests in these texts, and attempts to imitate them, have led scholars to refer to a “renaissance of the twelfth century.” More pupils entered schools. Some children of the upper classes began to regard literacy as a badge of status. Others were future notaries or merchants who needed some literacy and/or computational skills to advance their own careers. Such schools grew rapidly in the course of the thirteenth century and became completely independent of ecclesiastical control. As time went on instruction was offered in the European vernacular languages.

The rise of lay education was an enormously important development in western European history for two related reasons. The first was that the Church lost its monopoly over education for the first time in almost a millennium. Learning and resultant attitudes could now become more secular. Western culture therefore ultimately became more independent of religion than any other culture. Second, the growth of lay schools led to an enormous growth of lay literacy. Without it, many of Europe’s other accomplishments would have been inconceivable.

It should be emphasized that the institution of the university was really a medieval invention. The emergence of universities was part of the same high-medieval educational boom. The institution gained its greatest prominence from the time of its twelfth-century origins until the end of the Middle Ages as Europe’s leading center for the study of law. At first, medieval universities themselves were not so much places as groups of scholars. The term university originally meant a corporation or guild. In fact, all of the medieval universities were corporations, either of teachers or students. Every university in medieval Europe was patterned after one or the other of two different models：one was the University of Bologna, in which the students themselves constituted the corporation; the other is the University of Paris, which was not a guild of students but of teachers. But gradually the word university came to mean an educational institution with a school of liberal arts and one or more faculties in the professional subjects of law, medicine, and theology. Most of our modern degrees as well as our modern university organization derive from the medieval system, but actual courses of study have been greatly altered.

As the numbers of those educational at all levels vastly increased during the High Middle Ages, so did the quality of learning. This was owing first and foremost to the reacquisition of Greek knowledge and to the absorption of intellectual advances made by the Muslims. Since practically no western Europeans knew Greek or Arabic, works in those languages had to be transmitted by means of Latin translations. Suddenly, an enormous burst of translating activity made almost all of ancient Greek and Arabic scientific knowledge accessible to western Europeans. Greek works were first translated into Latin from earlier Arabic translations; then many were retranslated directly from the Greek by a few westerners. The result was that by about 1260 almost the entire Aristotelian corpus that is known today was made available in Latin. So also were basic works of such important Greek scientific thinkers as Euclid and Ptolemy. Only the milestones of Greek literature and the works of Plato were not yet translated because they had not been made available to the Arabs; they existed only in inaccessible Byzantine manuscripts.

Having acquired the best of Greek and Arabic scientific and speculative thought, the West was able to build on it and make its own advances. This progress transpired in different ways. When it came to natural science, westerners were able to start building on the acquired learning without much difficulty because it seldom conflicted with the principles of Christianity. But when it came to philosophy, the basic question arose as to who thoroughly Greek and Arabic though was compatible with the Christian faith. The most advanced thirteenth-century scientist was the Englishman Robert Grosseteste, who was not only a great thinker but was also very active in public life as bishop of Lincoln. He became so proficient at Greek that he translated all of Aristotle’s Ethics. More important, he made very significant theoretical advances in mathematics, astronomy, and optics. He formulated a sophisticated scientific explanation of the rainbow, and he posited the use of lenses for magnification. His leading disciple was Roger Bacon, who is today more famous than his teacher because he seems to have predicted automobiles and flying machines. Bacon in fact had no real interests in machinery, but he did follow up on Grosseteste’s work in optics, discussing, further properties of lenses, the rapid speed of light, and the nature of human vision. To this degree they can be seen as early forerunners of modern science. But the important qualification remains that they did not perform any real laboratory experiments.

The story of the high-medieval encounter between Greek and Arabic philosophy and Christian faith is basically the story of the emergence of Scholasticism. This word can be, and has been, defined in many ways. In its root meaning Scholasticism was simply the method of teaching and learning followed in the medieval schools. That meant that it was highly systematic and also that it was highly respectful of authority. Yet Scholasticism was not only a method of study: it was a worldview. As such, it taught that there was a fundamental compatibility between the knowledge humans can obtain naturally, i.e., by experience or reason, and the teachings imparted by Divine Revelation. Since medieval scholars believed that the Greeks were the masters of natural knowledge and that all revelation was in the Bible, Scholasticism consequently was the theory and practice of reconciling classical philosophy with Christian faith.

One of the most important thinkers who pave the way for Scholasticism was the stormy petrel Peter Abelard. He was so adept at logic and theology that even as a student he easily outshone the experts of his day. Abelard’s greatest contributions to the development of Scholasticism were made in his Sic et Non (Yes and No) and in a number of original theological works. In the work he prepared the way for the Scholastic method by gathering a collection of statements from the Church fathers that spoke for both sides of 150 theological questions. Later Scholastics would follow his method of studying theology by raising fundamental questions and arraying the answers that had been put forth in authoritative texts. He was one of the first to try to harmonize religion with rationalism and was in this capacity a herald of the Scholastic outlook.

Immediately after Abelard’s death two further steps were taken to prepare for mature Scholasticism. One was the writing of the Book of Sentences between 1155 and 1157 by Abelard’s student Peter Lombard. This raised all the most fundamental theological questions in rigorously consequential order, adduced answers from the Bible and Christian authorities on both sides of each question, and then proposed judgments on every case. By the thirteenth century Peter Lombard’s work became a standard text. The other basic step in the development of Scholasticism was the reacquisition of classical philosophy that occurred after about 1140. Scholastics of the mid-thirteenth century accordingly adhered to Peter Lombard’s organizational method, but added the consideration of Greek and Arabic philosophical authorities to that of purely Christian theological ones. In doing this they tried to construct systems of understanding the entire universe that most fully harmonized the earlier separate realms of faith and natural knowledge.

By far the greatest accomplishments in this endeavor were made by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the leading Scholastic theologian of the University of Paris. As a member of the Dominican order, St. Thomas was committed to the principle that faith could be defended by reason. More important, he believed that natural knowledge and the study of the created universe were legitimate ways of approaching theological wisdom because “nature” complements “grace.” By this he meant to say that because God created the natural world He can be approached through its terms even though ultimate certainty about the highest truths can only be obtained through the supernatural revelation of the Bible. Imbued with a deep confidence in the value of human reason and human experience, as well as in his own ability to harmonize Greek philosophy with Christian theology, Thomas was the most serene of saints. His vast Summaries are awesome for their rigorous orderliness and intellectual penetration. He admits in them that there are certain “mysteries of the faith,” such as the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, that cannot be approached by the unaided human intellect. He fully subordinated Aristotelianism to basic Christian principles and thereby created his own original philosophical and theological system. Aquinas placed a higher value on human reason, on human life in this world, and on the abilities of humans to participate in their own salvation. His influence lives on today insofar as he helped to revive confidence in rationalism and human experience. More directly, philosophy in the modern Roman Catholic Church is supposed to be taught according to the Thomistic method, doctrine, and principles.

With the achievements of St. Thomas Aquinas in the middle of the thirteenth century, Western medieval thought reached its pinnacle. Not coincidentally, other aspects of medieval civilization were reaching their pinnacles at the same time. Some ardent admirers of medieval culture have fixed on these accomplishments to call the thirteenth the “greatest of centuries.” Such a judgment, of course, is a matter of taste. It is often thought that medieval thinkers were excessively conservative, but in fact the greatest thinkers of the High Middle Ages were astonishingly receptive to new ideas. Scholastics unquestionably gave primacy to the soul over the body and to otherworldly salvation over life in the here and now. But they also exalted the dignity of human nature because they viewed it as a glorious divine creation, and they believed in the possibilities of a working alliance between themselves and God. Moreover, they had extraordinary faith in the powers of human reason – probably more than we do today.