MedievalFinal_Essay

In the period between 312 and 1650 AD, the Christian Church identified a number of peoples and groups as "other"—that is, non-Christian. How did it treat each of them over this period?

-Roman Empire 30-500 -Christians considered the gods of the pagans to be demons that had tricked humans into worshipping them. They therefore considered the pagans and their government to be evil, under the control of demons. They tried to avoid contact with the government and military as much as possible. The First Crusade (1095-1099), a holy war called by the pope that promised salvation for pious warriors who died in combat confessed, did not happen without some precedent. Since the late 800s, bishops and popes had urged Christian warriors to fight pagan attackers, promising that God would receive them into heaven if they died having confessed their sins before battle. The results were mixed. In the early 1000s more of these calls appeared, primarily because Western Christians were now pressing outward on their borders. The population of Europe was rising due to the agricultural improvements initiated by feudalism, and so was the number of trained knights, again due to the feudal system. The many sons of feudal lords who did not inherit a fief sought opportunities to capture one in war. They were drawn abroad, where victory meant capture and division of the loser's land into fiefs. By the mid-11th century, attacks on Muslim territories in Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and Southern Italy had led to conquest of those places, and the later decades saw the beginning of the "reconquest" (Reconquista) of Iberia from Muslim powers. By 1086, Christian rulers held half the peninsula. These wars probably would have happened anyway, but the promise of spiritual rewards certainly helped draw recruits. The attack on the Holy Land, however, was a special case. Most of the other expeditions aimed at targets close at hand; the eastern end of the Mediterranean was very much unknown country. Byzantine Emperors had been trying to draw Western European knights into their armies for several decades when the First Crusade began. They had even contacted pope in the hope that they would stir up support. But figures like Gregory VII were too busy with their struggles with the German emperors to pay attention. That changed, however, with Urban II (1088-1099). At the time he took the papal throne the reform popes were losing; they had been driven from Rome and were contending with an antipope appointed by the German emperor Henry IV. Urban had a natural flair for public relations. He moved to his native France and traveled around holding reform councils that highlighted his power over the church and the errors of Henry IV. He even bribed his way into Rome one Christmas to celebrate mass at St. John Lateran, the main church in the city at that time. As he traveled around, Urban kept running into pilgrims returning from the Holy Land who complained of mistreatment by the Seljuk (Saljuq) Turks, Muslim tribesmen who had recently conquered the area (from other Muslims—Arab Muslims had geld the area since 638). Urban decided to call a holy war to solve the recover the Holy Places. He laid out his reasons, as well as the usual promise of salvation to knights who died in the fighting, in the speech he delivered at a council at Clermont in November 1095. Another negative episode for some people was the Crusade called by Pope Innocent III in 1208 against the heretical group known as Cathars. At this point the papacy was just beginning to realize the danger of growing heresy in Europe, and the Cathars (also called Albigensians) were particularly threatening. Centered in southern France, they believed in a dualistic theology that seemed to some theologians no longer Christian, positing two Gods, one of light and one of darkness, one good and one evil. They rejected many worldly institutions, including the church, and declared the duty of their followers was to try to remove themselves from the bonds of matter, which was evil, so that their spirits could enjoy full freedom. They resisted conversion, and were violent to those that opposed them. When one of his emissaries was murdered, Pope Innocent III declared a full-scale Crusade against them, including the nobility of the region, which seemed to be shielding the heretics. Large numbers of French nobles responded, many from northern France. By 1220 they had defeated all the Cathar forces, often massacring the populations of towns that resisted them. The northern French nobles who had joined the Crusade then divided the conquered lands among themselves. Though medieval people feared heretics, this episode seemed to some a land-grab that diminished further the reputation of the Crusade. (A byproduct of the Crusade against the Cathars was the Inquisition, instituted in 1233 to root out Cathars who had been missed by the Crusade and gone into hiding.) - Treatment of the Jews • In the early days of the church, tensions between the Christian community and Jewish authorities grew as some Jewish leaders objected to the teachings of the new sect. By the 80s AD, Christians identified themselves as separate from Jews. The annihilation of the Christian community at Jerusalem when the Romans captured Jerusalem in 70 AD and slaughtered the entire population helped accelerate this process. Antipathy arose, as is reflected in the Gospels. • When Christianity was embraced by the Roman Empire after Constantine's conversion, Christian leaders preached acceptance and protection of Jewish populations, citing the Jews' acceptance of a significant part of God's revelation as the reason. Bishops were tasked with protection of Jews. • Church law eventually required bishops to protect the Jewish populations of their dioceses. • There were negative conceptions of the Jews as stubborn resisters of God's true teaching from early in the church's history, but Jews were left in relative peace until the Crusades. They were seen as other, but usually not molested. • The Crusades brought out in European Christians violent hostilities against Jews. This may have been rooted in a relatively new phenomenon, the use of Jews as moneylenders in the emerging economy of the 11th century. Usury had been forbidden to Christians since the Barbarian Period, but Jews did not fall under that restriction. Many businessmen and rulers encouraged Jews to fill this niche in the late 900s and 1000s. But over the 11th century, the identification of Jews with moneylending seems to have led to resentment at their success and irrational anger that they charged interest on loans. Charging interest, called usury, was the reason Christians were forbidden to engage in moneylending. Church law written in the barbarian era, when the economy was flat, seemed like stealing, because there was no place a person could invest the money and make interest. Owing interest when the loan was due would therefore always lead to default. It seemed like a form of legal theft. The situation had completely changed, of course, by the time the Jews were being brought in to act as bankers. Businesses needed loans to function, and interest was easily made. But the church laws remained in place, considered as unchangeable, and anyone angry at the bank could point to them as a reason to hate the bankers, who were, of course, Jewish. • There were a number of massacres of Jewish populations as Christian armies formed to go on the First Crusade in 1095-1096. In some towns bishops successfully protected the Jews, sometimes by force. In a few, bishops died unsuccessfully defending them. Some historians suspect that some of these incidents were caused by nobles eager to plunder Jewish banks to help finance their expeditions. Another cause was the xenophobia being fueled by the papal rhetoric about Muslims. • From this point, anti-Jewish sentiment was strong in many parts of Europe, and stories of Jewish treachery and plotting against Christians became a staple of the culture. • Although papal policy was to protect Jews, one pope, Gregory IX, condemned the collection of Jewish teaching on the Old Testament called the Talmud as inspired by the Devil—the same kind of rhetoric used to describe heretical teachings. It is important to understand that this occurred at a high point in papal anxiety about heresy. Gregory IX was the same pope who initiated the Inquisition. • In the 14th century, Jews were expelled from England and France, driving many eastward into Germany and Eastern Europe. • Similarly, Jews (and Muslims) were expelled from Spain in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella defeated the last Muslims powers on the Iberian Peninsula. Jews and Muslims who chose to stay in Spain had to convert to Christianity, and the monarchy took control of the Inquisition in Spain (from the papacy) partly to insure that the converts did not relapse. This was the "Spanish Inquisition." • Attacks on Jews continued periodically, often in times of stress or fear. • Jews continued to face government restrictions into the 19th century in Eastern and Central Europe, and prejudice and discrimination into the 20th. • The genocide of the Holocaust was rooted in these prejudices created in the Middle Ages. Throughout the Barbarian Period and after, common people had been engaging in magical acts to gain fertility for themselves and their land, curse enemies, etc. In most cases they were using methods that dated back to pagan times. The clergy saw these as attempts to gain the assistance of demonic powers, but the punishments meted out indicate that clergy viewed the situation with relative calm until the late 14th century. Then a significant change occurred. Many thinkers became convinced that demons were widespread and doing great damage to Christian society, luring both men and women into compacts with Satan that gave them great powers (which they often used to do evil) in exchange for their souls. This invisible army of witches and wizards (also called warlocks) was thought to be lurking at the edges of society, posing a constant threat. -This "Witch Craze," as historians call it, featured outbreaks of concern that would be met with rapid and massive intervention by the authorities. Many people were accused and many were punished after admitting their crime. The usual punishment, like that for heresy, was burning—quite different from the penalties in the pre-Craze period, when church authorities were much more relaxed about the problem. -The Reformed Churches of Protestantism discarded quite a number of Catholic beliefs, but they had no trouble retaining the Church's ideas about witchcraft. Prosecution of witches continued in Protestant lands for as long as they did in Catholic lands. It is important to remember that the last manifestation of the European Witch Craze occurred among the Calvinist colonists of Massachusetts in 1692. Europeans had a great deal of difficulty discarding these beliefs. Catholics and Protestants continued to struggle for another century (1517-1648). Between 1517 and the 1550s there were intermittent local wars, but most were indecisive. As both sides became convinced of the futility of warfare to salve the problem, they settled into a kind of Cold War, allowing the religion of a ruler to determine the religion of a state. (That ruler, of course, would persecute anyone in his state who did not subscribe to his religious beliefs.) This brought attempts by both sides to undermine regimes, as the Calvinists did in France (where they were called "Huguenots") and the Jesuits did in England during the late 16th century. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), fought mostly in Germany, was the last and most violent stage of the Catholic Protestant conflict. Tremendously destructive, it ended in a draw. This caused a significant number of European intellectuals to realize the futility of religious warfare. For many, the details of religious doctrines came to be seen as less important that they had been earlier, given the terrible consequences that the Thirty Years War had brought. The result was a very slow drift toward religious tolerance, first among Protestant sects, and eventually between Protestants and Catholics. The shift was on a state-by-state basis.

Explain the forces that brought on the rise of Protestantism. What effects did Protestantism have on Christianity in Europe? What effects did it have on the Catholic Church?

-The Reformed Churches of Protestantism discarded quite a number of Catholic beliefs, but they had no trouble retaining the Church's ideas about witchcraft. Prosecution of witches continued in Protestant lands for as long as they did in Catholic lands. It is important to remember that the last manifestation of the European Witch Craze occurred among the Calvinist colonists of Massachusetts in 1692. Europeans had a great deal of difficulty discarding these beliefs. -The unwillingness of the clergy to accommodate lay concerns about reform and lay involvement in church liturgy and the seeming corruption of the papacy seem to have fed the enthusiasm for the Protestant Movement begun by Martin Luther (1483-1545) in 1517. Luther's attacks on papal authority to grant indulgences—forgiveness of time in purgatory in return for payments to the church—and other seeming abuses in the church brought many followers by the 1520s. Luther and his followers claimed to be reviving the true apostolic practice of the church and reforming many bad practices that had crept in, much as the Papal Reformers of the 1000s had described the corruptions they perceived. -The Papal Revolutionaries in the 1000s had tried to solve the corruption in their time by putting the popes in control of the church, claiming this was the ancient pattern of church government. Luther thought the solution to corruption in his time was removal of the popes. He claimed that papal power was actually a corruption of the true apostolic government of the church, in which the community had governed itself. Like the Papal Revolutionaries, he believed that he was reviving the true apostolic pattern of belief and church government. -An unexpected and distressing development for Luther was the emergence of many sects in Protestantism rather than one united movement. He had demanded that the Bible be translated into the vernacular, as many earlier protestors had, and even made a translation himself into German. He expected that all those who read the translated words would interpret them as he did, but to his chagrin, many new Protestants disagreed with him. Each new interpretation of the Scriptures produced a new Protestant sect, and the simple reform that Luther envisioned never happened. -The resulting divisions among Protestants, even to the point of warfare, is one of the reasons that Catholicism was able to survive the initial onslaught of Protestantism despite the failure of the popes of the 1520s and 1530s to provide much vigorous leadership. The Protestants were fighting each other as well as the Catholics. Protestant as well as Catholic secular rulers arrested those accused of heresy and executed those convicted. -Protestantism was saved by John Calvin (1509-1564). This French theologian identified certain beliefs common to all Protestants in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. His work led Protestants to work together despite their disagreements. This allowed them to present a united front to the Catholics. -Generally, Protestantism reflected some of the beliefs of the lay-centered heresies of preceding centuries. It was anti-clerical, stressed lay leadership, rejected "superstitious" practices, translated the Bible into the vernacular, and championed individual interpretation of the Bible. By the late 1540s, Protestants were generally working together, at least against the Catholics. -The Catholics found their response to Protestantism at the Council of Trent (1545-1547, 1551-1553, 1561-1563). Fear of councils had kept popes from calling a council—the standard tool for answering a heresy and implementing reform—for almost thirty years after Luther's first attack on the church in 1517. -Called by Pope Paul III (1534-1549) in response to demands from Catholic theologians and other leaders, the Council of Trent saved the church and the position of the popes by clearly defining much Catholic doctrine that had become murky for many laypeople. The council also thoroughly reformed the training and life of the clergy and affirmed the popes' autocratic authority over the church. These measures actually drew many people back from Protestantism. Catholics and Protestants continued to struggle for another century (1517-1648). Between 1517 and the 1550s there were intermittent local wars, but most were indecisive. As both sides became convinced of the futility of warfare to salve the problem, they settled into a kind of Cold War, allowing the religion of a ruler to determine the religion of a state. (That ruler, of course, would persecute anyone in his state who did not subscribe to his religious beliefs.) This brought attempts by both sides to undermine regimes, as the Calvinists did in France (where they were called "Huguenots") and the Jesuits did in England during the late 16th century. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), fought mostly in Germany, was the last and most violent stage of the Catholic Protestant conflict. Tremendously destructive, it ended in a draw. This caused a significant number of European intellectuals to realize the futility of religious warfare. For many, the details of religious doctrines came to be seen as less important that they had been earlier, given the terrible consequences that the Thirty Years War had brought. The result was a very slow drift toward religious tolerance, first among Protestant sects, and eventually between Protestants and Catholics. The shift was on a state-by-state basis. Religion became seen as a private matter in Europe—though religious prejudices continue to the present, and Protestant countries were quicker to embrace these ideas than Catholic. Though the religious indifference of many intellectuals in the Enlightenment (ca. 1650-1800) and after had something to do with this, the biggest factor was the latent fear of the destructive consequences of religious strife. The unwillingness to judge the religious beliefs of another is a mark of modern society, and can be attributed as much to fear of the destructiveness of religious warfare as to Enlightenment rationalism.

What impact did the Crusades have on Europe? Be sure to consider all effects, not just those on the church.

1. Effect on the papacy The First Crusade's success gave the reform papacy a huge boost in public opinion. The German emperor had been winning his war with the popes until 1099; now people began to believe that the papacy did have a mandate from God. The capture of Jerusalem seemed to them miraculous. Popes were able to use this rise in public sentiment to create truces with the kings of Europe over ending of lay investiture, the appointment of clergy by rulers. Treaties were signed with the French and English kings in 1106 1n 1107, and with the German ruler in 1122. From that point, the papacy was on the rise as a factor in Europe's politics. When the Crusades began to fail later in the 12th century, the popes had moved to other accomplishments that drew support—such as their very efficient and rational judicial system—so they did not lose popularity as a result. But they continued to support Crusades for the next several centuries, even as the Crusades became less and less popular. 2. Effect on Christian society The nobility of Europe continued to be drawn to the idea of Crusade for several centuries after the immense success of the first one. By 1291 Europeans had lost their holdings on the Asian mainland, but they continued to war on Muslim powers from their strongholds on the islands off the coast such as Rhodes, Cyprus, and even Malta. This continued into the 1600s. Even when the promise of papal blessings began to fade as an attractant, chivalric notions of war for glory kept drawing recruits up to the 15th century. After that, "Crusade" continued to be used to describe wars that were really led by Christian rulers for new lands, as happened in Spain and the Baltic in the 15th century. A unified Spain was the result of the Crusades there, and the eastern parts of modern Germany were conquered during the Baltic Crusades. Throughout this period, despite diminishing interest among laymen, the popes continued their diplomatic calls for Crusades. 3. Effect on the Mediterranean The Crusades projected the powers of Europe into the Mediterranean. Italian city-states, especially Venice, made great economic gains and improved their trading position enormously. Christian military orders like the Knights of St. John and the Knights of Malta became powerful forces in the Mediterranean, as did the kings of Aragon, the Spanish kingdom on the eastern coast of Iberia that joined with Castile in 1492 to create the kingdom of Spain. The wealth of the Silk Road trade that ended in the Mediterranean flowed into the coffers of Italian cities, Aragon, and some of the religious orders. 4. Attitudes toward Muslims Most Christians had little notion of Muslims before 1095, and even less knowledge of their religion. Even Christian leaders showed this kind of ignorance. Many believed that Islam was a pagan religion that worshipped Mohammed. There was talk of Muslims having idols in their "temples." Christian missionaries and scholars learned more about Islam eventually, especially in Iberia, where conversations between Muslims and Christians were opened, and Christians began attempts at conversion in earnest. However, Muslims continued to be a people to be feared by most Christians, not only because the Turks recovered the Holy Places in 1291 and kept the Western Christians out thereafter, but also because the Ottoman sultans managed to raise military forces that invaded the Balkans in the 1400s, captured much of Hungary by the early 1500s, and threatened Austria in the 1600s. In Spain the characterization of the Muslim as enemy led to identification of the true Christian as the only kind of loyal Spanish citizen. It was for this reason that Muslims and even Jews were expelled from the country when Ferdinand and Isabella finally defeated the last Muslim rulers in 1492 and got total control of the Iberian Peninsula. 5. Negative image of the Crusades The Crusades were met with great enthusiasm when they were called in 1095, and continued to hold that enthusiasm until the mid-1100s. The failure of the Second Crusade (1146-1149) to recover important parts of Syria that had been taken back by the Muslim leader Zengi in the 1140s, and the failure of the Third Crusade (1187-1192) to win back the many territories lost to the united forces of Saladin in the 1180s, gave many people pause. When the Fourth Crusade (1204-1205) never got to its goal, but instead attacked and plundered Christian Constantinople and set up a Western kingdom there (1205-1261), some of the luster of the Crusade began to wear off. The failure of other Crusades to deal with the Mamluk campaign in the last decades of the 13th century (that drove Crusading forces of the mainland of Asia in 1291) did even more damage.

During the period 312 to 1650 AD, what was the attitude of the Catholic Church authorities toward the Jews? Were there any changes in attitude over this period? What were they, and why did they arise?

• In the early days of the church, tensions between the Christian community and Jewish authorities grew as some Jewish leaders objected to the teachings of the new sect. By the 80s AD, Christians identified themselves as separate from Jews. The annihilation of the Christian community at Jerusalem when the Romans captured Jerusalem in 70 AD and slaughtered the entire population helped accelerate this process. Antipathy arose, as is reflected in the Gospels. • When Christianity was embraced by the Roman Empire after Constantine's conversion, Christian leaders preached acceptance and protection of Jewish populations, citing the Jews' acceptance of a significant part of God's revelation as the reason. Bishops were tasked with protection of Jews. • Church law eventually required bishops to protect the Jewish populations of their dioceses. • There were negative conceptions of the Jews as stubborn resisters of God's true teaching from early in the church's history, but Jews were left in relative peace until the Crusades. They were seen as other, but usually not molested. • The Crusades brought out in European Christians violent hostilities against Jews. This may have been rooted in a relatively new phenomenon, the use of Jews as moneylenders in the emerging economy of the 11th century. Usury had been forbidden to Christians since the Barbarian Period, but Jews did not fall under that restriction. Many businessmen and rulers encouraged Jews to fill this niche in the late 900s and 1000s. But over the 11th century, the identification of Jews with moneylending seems to have led to resentment at their success and irrational anger that they charged interest on loans. Charging interest, called usury, was the reason Christians were forbidden to engage in moneylending. Church law written in the barbarian era, when the economy was flat, seemed like stealing, because there was no place a person could invest the money and make interest. Owing interest when the loan was due would therefore always lead to default. It seemed like a form of legal theft. The situation had completely changed, of course, by the time the Jews were being brought in to act as bankers. Businesses needed loans to function, and interest was easily made. But the church laws remained in place, considered as unchangeable, and anyone angry at the bank could point to them as a reason to hate the bankers, who were, of course, Jewish. • There were a number of massacres of Jewish populations as Christian armies formed to go on the First Crusade in 1095-1096. In some towns bishops successfully protected the Jews, sometimes by force. In a few, bishops died unsuccessfully defending them. Some historians suspect that some of these incidents were caused by nobles eager to plunder Jewish banks to help finance their expeditions. Another cause was the xenophobia being fueled by the papal rhetoric about Muslims. • From this point, anti-Jewish sentiment was strong in many parts of Europe, and stories of Jewish treachery and plotting against Christians became a staple of the culture. • Although papal policy was to protect Jews, one pope, Gregory IX, condemned the collection of Jewish teaching on the Old Testament called the Talmud as inspired by the Devil—the same kind of rhetoric used to describe heretical teachings. It is important to understand that this occurred at a high point in papal anxiety about heresy. Gregory IX was the same pope who initiated the Inquisition. • In the 14th century, Jews were expelled from England and France, driving many eastward into Germany and Eastern Europe. • Similarly, Jews (and Muslims) were expelled from Spain in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella defeated the last Muslims powers on the Iberian Peninsula. Jews and Muslims who chose to stay in Spain had to convert to Christianity, and the monarchy took control of the Inquisition in Spain (from the papacy) partly to insure that the converts did not relapse. This was the "Spanish Inquisition." • Attacks on Jews continued periodically, often in times of stress or fear. • Jews continued to face government restrictions into the 19th century in Eastern and Central Europe, and prejudice and discrimination into the 20th. • The genocide of the Holocaust was rooted in these prejudices created in the Middle Ages.

Why did magic and witchcraft become such a concern for Christians after the late 1300s? Compare the church's methods for dealing with witchcraft, including investigation and punishments, before and after that period?

Anne Marie de Georgcl and Catherine, the wife of Delon, both from Toulouse and advanced in years, have declared in their confessions to the legal authorities that they have been members of the numberless hosts of Satan for about twenty years, and have given themselves to him for this life and the next. Frequently on Friday nights they have attended the Sabbath that is held sometimes in one place, sometimes in another. There, in company with other men and womcn who are equally sacrilegious, they commit all manlier of excesses, whose details arc horrible to tell. Each of them has been interrogated separately and they have given explanations that have entirely convinced us of their guilt. Anne Marie de Georgel declares that one morning when she was wash¬ing clothes near Pech-David above the town, she saw a man of huge stature coming towards her across the water. He was dark-skinned and his eyes burned like living coals; he was dressed in the hides of beasts. This monster asked her if she would give herself to him and she said yes. Then he blew into her mouth and from the Saturday following she was borne to the Sabbath, simply because it was his will. There she found a huge male goat and after greeting him she submitted to his pleasure. The male goat in return taught her all kinds of secret spells; he explained poisonous plants to her and she learned from him words for incantations and how to cast spells during the night of the vigil of St. John's feast, Christmas Eve, and the first Friday in every month. He advised her to make sacrilegious communion if she could, offending God and honoring the Devil. And she carried out these impious suggestions. Anne Marie de Georgel then admitted that she had not ceased to do evil, practicing all manner of filthiness during the years that passed from the time of her initiation to that of her imprisonment. The fear of Our Lord did not stay her hand. She boiled together in a cauldron, over an accursed fire, poisonous herbs and substances taken from the bodies of animals or humans which she had sacrilegiously and foully taken from the consecrated ground of cemeteries to use for her spells; she frequented the gallows-trees by night stealing shreds of clothing from the hanged, or taking the rope by which they were hanging, or laying hold of their hair, their nails or flesh. Like a true daughter of Satan, in answer to questions about the symbols of the Apostles and the faith which true believers have in our Holy Religion, she averred that God and the Devil were completely equal, the former reigning over the sky and the latter the earth; all souls which the Devil managed to seduce were lost to the Most High God and lived perpetually on earth or in the air, going every night to visit the houses in which they had lived and trying to inspire in their children and relatives a desire to serve the Devil rather than God. She also told us that the struggle between God and the Devil had gone on since eternity and would have no end. Sometimes one is victorious, sometimes the other, and at this time the situation was such that Satan was sure to triumph. At first, after she had been taken prisoner, having been denounced by respectable persons who had good reason to complain of her spells, she denied the abominable pact she had made and would not confess in spite of the requests of others as well as ourselves. But when she had been justly forced to give an account of herself, she finally admitted a series of crimes that deserved the most horrible punishment. She has sworn she repents, and has asked for reconciliation with the Church that has been granted her. Nevertheless, she must still be turned over to the secular arm, which will hand out the penalties she must pay. -Despite an elaborate machinery to suppress heresy, non-standard views and doubt about religion increased. The spread of literacy helped here, as did the thrust of the new thinking. It focused on criticism of a clergy that was vulnerable. The church was also diverted from investigating heresy by a new concern. The Inquisition also spent a tremendous amount of energy investigating witchcraft, which became in European society from the late 1300s until the end of the 17th century. The sources of this anxiety are unclear, though some scholars have pointed to the disasters that struck Europe in the 14th century and the great shifts in society that ensued. -Throughout the Barbarian Period and after, common people had been engaging in magical acts to gain fertility for themselves and their land, curse enemies, etc. In most cases they were using methods that dated back to pagan times. The clergy saw these as attempts to gain the assistance of demonic powers, but the punishments meted out indicate that clergy viewed the situation with relative calm until the late 14th century. Then a significant change occurred. Many thinkers became convinced that demons were widespread and doing great damage to Christian society, luring both men and women into compacts with Satan that gave them great powers (which they often used to do evil) in exchange for their souls. This invisible army of witches and wizards (also called warlocks) was thought to be lurking at the edges of society, posing a constant threat. -This "Witch Craze," as historians call it, featured outbreaks of concern that would be met with rapid and massive intervention by the authorities. Many people were accused and many were punished after admitting their crime. The usual punishment, like that for heresy, was burning—quite different from the penalties in the pre-Craze period, when church authorities were much more relaxed about the problem. -The Reformed Churches of Protestantism discarded quite a number of Catholic beliefs, but they had no trouble retaining the Church's ideas about witchcraft. Prosecution of witches continued in Protestant lands for as long as they did in Catholic lands. It is important to remember that the last manifestation of the European Witch Craze occurred among the Calvinist colonists of Massachusetts in 1692. Europeans had a great deal of difficulty discarding these beliefs.

In what ways did conflicting notions of apostolic perfection threaten the stability of the Catholic Church in the period 1100 to 1650 AD?

As the inhabitants of medieval towns preferred to rely on themselves to take care of their temporal needs, they also preferred to rely on themselves to see to their spiritual needs. In the country, Christians approached religion with relative passivity, depending on the clergy to insure salvation through the sacraments. City-dwellers wanted a more active role. They were particularly concerned about their wealth—the thing that kept them from destitution in the rough and tumble economic urban word. Having it seemed very much at odds with the model of perfection they had learned from the monastic theology most were exposed to. Their sense of guilt at being wealthy was also driven by the extremes of wealth and poverty in the towns—much greater than in the countryside—and by their need to engage in usury—forbidden as sinful by the church for several centuries—to do business effectively. This guilt led to a new conception of apostolic perfection. Though these mendicant orders met an immediate need, they also created new problems. Their claims to follow a more perfect way of life than anyone else triggered negative reactions from monastic theologians and especially from the diocesan (or "secular") clergy, who did not even take a vow of poverty, but considered themselves proper observers of Christ's perfection. In a church that believed that all the truths of the faith had been given at its creation, the introduction of seemingly new beliefs was bound to create trouble—in this case, ideas about Christ's true perfection. The mendicants might satisfy some of the spiritual needs of lay people, but they seemed to some clergy to be heretical. The key problem was that the claims of the Franciscans and Dominicans suggested that they were observing a counsel of Christ that had not been observed for most of the church's history. Counsels were the teachings that Christ gave the church to allow people to achieve not just a minimal salvation (precepts taught these), but also a higher perfection. The Franciscans claimed that their individual and common poverty was the practice most conducive to this perfection, and implied that those who didn't practice it would not achieve that perfection. This created another problem. It implied that this teaching had not been taught or practiced by the church for most of its history—that is, since the time of the apostles. The common conception of the church saw it as perfectly maintaining all of the teachings of Christ since the founding of the church, so the Franciscan teaching contradicted this and implied that the church had been imperfect. Some Franciscans actually embraced this idea, suggesting that St. Francis had some special revelation from God to bring this teaching back to the church. That directly challenged the church's worthiness as a vessel of Christ's message, and sat like a time bomb underneath the debates Franciscans carried on with the representatives of other religious and the secular clergy over the late 13th and early 14th centuries. The entire history of the Christian Church is filled with attempts to achieve reform of some sort, but this is especially true of the Later Medieval Period, the years from 1000 to 1500. The papal reformers of the 1000s were trying to restore Christ's true teaching on clerical perfection when their attacked simony, clerical marriage, and lay investiture. They tried very hard to bring the church back to apostolic perfection over the next two centuries, and were willing to adapt to new perceptions of that perfection, as they did in accepting the mendicant orders as true representatives of Christian life in the early 1200s. But they ran into trouble with the mendicant movement of the 13th century. Conceptions of perfection championed by the mendicants that resonated so well with the laity in fact contradicted long-held beliefs about the structure of the church. The popes backed the mendicants because of their apparent ability to spearhead a reform of the lives of the laity, but failed to foresee the reaction of their own diocesan clergy. As a result, the popes were here caught in a complex clash of medieval values in the years after 1250. 1.) The mendicants claimed the perfection of Christ and the apostles came from living as mendicants. 2.) Franciscans went further, saying it came from living as Franciscans did, poor as individuals and as a group. 3.) That suggested that the popes should shift reform in that direction, altering the structure of the church's organization to fit in the mendicants. . But the traditions of the church that were also supposed to preserve Christ and the apostles' teachings said nothing about the claims of the Franciscans. 4.) Had the church failed to preserve those vital teachings of the church over most of the church's history, as the Franciscan beliefs implied? That could be interpreted as heresy. 5.) Everyone new that the majority of the clergy had never lived that way. Were the clergy to be reformed and forced to live as Franciscans? 6.) That didn't seem practical. The values of medieval society demanded that persons of authority like bishops and popes display wealth and seem to spend it freely to maintain respect and credibility. 7.) What would happen to the place the papal reformers had carved out in the rough and tumble world of medieval rulers if they were to suddenly embrace the poverty the Franciscans preached? Could they command respect, and how could they resist kings who chose to dominate them? They would have no money or armies to defend themselves. 8.) The popes chose to steer a middle course on these issues over the 13th and 14th centuries, and paid a price. 9.) They incurred the wrath of Franciscan extremists, who branded them heretics and corruptors of the church. 10.) They also suffered the anger of some of the laity, who hurled similar criticisms at them after being influenced by Franciscan thinking. The popes and the rest of the clergy were also on the horns of a dilemma over the demands being made by many laymen to be given an active role in the religious system. 1.) They knew the clergy had been established as the leaders of the Christian community early on in the church's history. 2.) The Papal Revolution had cemented the clergy's position of leadership and tightly defined their authority. 3.) If the lay demands were implemented, clerical powers have to be redefined and, in some cases, transferred to the laity? 4.) The Scriptures had been interpreted for centuries as supporting clerical authority. These new ideas seemed to question the church's interpretation of Scripture. 5.) The response of the clergy to these demands was mixed, but in the end failed to satisfy extremists. 6.) The disasters that befell Europe in the 1300s led to rapid shifts in lay spirituality, and accelerated lay demands for greater inclusion in the sacramental and liturgical functioning of the church, and more critical of clerical failings. 7.) The popes failure to respond to calls for reforming councils, especially after 1440, not only marked them in some people's minds as unwilling to reform the church, but also as out of step with evolving European governmental standards. For several centuries, secular governments had been using representative bodies analogous to the church council as part of decision-making. 8.) Thus the attempts of the clergy to maintain the traditions of church order and hierarchy while at the same time responding to new needs of the church failed in significant ways, and this led to a crisis of faith in the clerical establishment. 9.) By the early 1500s, Luther's idea that there was no special priesthood, but a "priesthood of all believers" made great sense to many Christians. So it was that conflicting notions of reform and of apostolic perfection that emerged in the Later Middle Ages did as much to undermine the status of the Catholic clergy as the more obvious problems: clerical laxity, papal excesses (especially in the political struggles in Italy) and refusal to call councils, sale of indulgences, and any number of other real failings that afflicted the church in that period. The failures were real, but underlying them was an increasing perception by many that the church's leadership had lost sight of its true purpose and was betraying its calling and the interests of the church itself. These perceptions drew people to Protestantism after Luther raised the call. The real problem was that the church's ultimate salvific purpose, or at least the obvious means to that purpose, had been obscured over the centuries after the Papal Revolution in a tangle of conflicting secondary objectives—papal theocracy, control of Italy, reform through new orders that appealed to shifting conceptions of Christian perfection—all of which had been undertaken with the best of intentions.

Explain the importance of heresy to the Christian church as it passed through the various stages of European history we have studied between 312 and 1650 AD. How did the church deal with heresy during each of those eras?

Heresy emerged early in the Apostolic Church (St. Paul discusses it in the Epistle to the Romans ca. 50 AD). One of the solutions to the disputes created by heresy was the emergence of the "monarchial bishop." The bishops excommunicated heretics and drove them from their communities, but that did not end the preaching of the heretics. Despite the power of bishops, heresy created considerable tension among Christian communities, and much debate (often in tracts distributed to the Christian communities involved). This is how they managed these controversies while still remaining secret. It did not end heresies, and some survived for centuries. Bishops tried to control heresy by excommunicating heretics—cutting them off completely from contact with the Christian community in their diocese. If the heresy became widespread, they would meet in local councils (sometimes called "synods") to discuss the problem and offer a clear definition of the truth of faith that was at issue. This was difficult because of the need to remain undetected by authorities. When Constantine began to favor Christians after 312, he was horrified by the factionalism that emerged. (He had been impressed by the seeming order of the church in the face of persecution.) He expected Christians to support his agenda, not fight with each other. To deal with the problem, Constantine called the first General Council, the Council of Nicaea (325), a meeting of all the bishops in the world (or at least all those who could attend). In effect, he expanded the usual solution employed by bishops to a grand, empire-wide scale. The council determined the true belief of the church. Christians believed that the church as a whole could not deviate from the truth Christ had given it, and, as the bishops were elected by their flocks and therefore represented the whole church, the decision was believed to be infallibly true. They accepted the concept of the general council because it was simply an upscaling of the synods already being used to control heresy. Constantine enforced the decisions of the Council of Nicaea in the 320s and 330s, and began the tradition of persecution of heretics by secular government. Other Roman Emperors followed his lead. Heresy became an important factor in wars over the Roman imperial throne after the 300s, with rival political factions championing opposing interpretations of Christian doctrine. As a result, emperors became very vigilant about any deviations from they considered standard belief throughout the long history (to 1453) of the Eastern Roman Empire. Heresy continued to be both a religious and a political issue for centuries in the Eastern Roman Empire. Heresy was not much of an issue during the Barbarian Period in Western Europe, partly because clergy were more concerned with suppressing paganism and partly because many clergy did not have the training to identify the subtle variations of doctrine that often constituted heresy. Heresy again became a concern during the 700s and early 800s, especially during the reign of Charlemagne (768-814), when the papacy became concerned about beliefs being taught in the Eastern Roman Empire. These were the debates over "Iconoclasm"--which considered artistic representations of religious figures such as Christ and the saints to be idolatry—and "Filioque"—another misinterpretation of the nature of Christ. However, the "heretics" being attacked were not inside but outside Western European society, in a distant state that was in some ways a rival to Charlemagne's Empire, so their condemnation had little effect. These concerns died down with the collapse of Charlemagne's Empire, and heresy did not become an issue again until the church reform movements of the 1000s. The church reformers and papal revolutionaries of the 1000s once again revived sophisticated discussion of doctrine among Christians. The principal focus was the corruption of the church's ancient teachings that had occurred because of the interference of laymen in the church's business. Identifying correct teachings as well as errors in the transmission of tradition and became of paramount concern and the reformers, and churchmen were increasingly on the lookout for variances in doctrine throughout the 11th and 12th centuries. There were some teachers identified as heretics in this period, but they did not gather large followings until the late 1100s. (Concern about heresy may also have claimed the lives of some of the reformers in the early 1000s. It is now thought that some of the figures traditionally identified as heretics were actually teaching reformed doctrines that local clergy identified as aberrant.) The main authorities tasked with identifying and condemning heresies up until the early 1200s continued to be the bishops. They investigated, tried, and punished heretics. The punishment they imposed continued to be banishment from the community, as it had been in the ancient church. However, over time it became evident that some bishops were lax in this duty, and that others were fearful of retaliation by well-organized and sometimes violent groups of heretics like the Cathars of Southern France. So, by the late 1100s, some monarchs were bypassing the bishops and taking action on their own, alarmed at the disruptive effects heretics might have in their kingdoms. They were particularly concerned because some heretics of the time refused to recognize secular authority. These rulers also began to impose harsh penalties; Henry II of England (1154-1189), for example, condemned heretics to burning at the stake. By the 1200s, this had become a common penalty for so-called recusant heretics (repeat offenders) throughout Europe. It was always meted out by the secular power, but only after the condemned heretic had been judged and handed over by ecclesiastical power. In the late 1100s, the Cathar or Albigensian heretics of Southern France became a serious problem. Their numbers and their apparent conversion of many of the nobility in their region led to a concentrated effort by the papacy to win them back to orthodox belief. The popes got involved because they were disturbed at the failure of local bishops to handle the situation. Many missionaries were sent by the popes; bishops were also pressured to arrest heretics in their dioceses. But there was still little progress. When a papal legate to the South of France was murdered in 1208 by a squire of one of the nobles suspected of heresy, Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), one of the most proactive popes of the Middle Ages, decided to use force to solve the Cathar problem. He chose to categorize the Cathars as violent unbelievers, and this made them reasonable targets of a Crusade. The Crusade he called against the Cathars lasted until 1220. By then it had massacred many heretics, replaced most of the nobility in Southern France with Crusaders from Northern France, and driven the surviving Cathars underground. To contend with these secret heretics, Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) founded the Inquisition (today often called the "Papal Inquisition" to distinguish it from the later "Spanish Inquisition"). Directed by the papacy, this organization send papal agents into areas where heresy flourished to form investigative tribunals of trusted clergy. They would look into accusations of heresy—accusations usually submitted to the tribunal anonymously to protect the accuser. The accused was not so well protected. This was, ironically, a direct violation of the deeply ingrained medieval (and barbarian) tradition requiring an accuser to face the accused. Over the centuries of the Later Middle Ages, heresies seemed to proliferate, taxing the energy of inquisitors. For example, the Waldensians, a group that had begun as an association of lay people who wanted to imitate the apostles, were condemned by the church in 1180 and fled to the rural areas of France, Italy, and Germany, where they were very difficult to identify. They were never wiped out, and survived as a sect into modern times. Their survival suggests the difficulties the church faced in trying to root out everyone who questioned established doctrine. That the church was trying to do this indicates the anxiety authorities felt—both church and state authorities—about the existence of heresy. Both groups were convinced that God wanted them to maintain the true teaching of Christianity and oppose it with whatever power they had. Punishments for heresy after 1233 were severe. Those who admitted heresy the first time had their property confiscated and were given a significant penance (like a pilgrimage). Those convicted a second time were handed over to the secular authorities, and the usual punishment imposed was death by fire. The Inquisition was a powerful instrument for imposing uniformity of belief. Monarchs envied it, and at least one state simply coopted it to insure loyalty of its subjects. The Spanish rulers Ferdinand (1479-1516) and Isabella (1479-1504) took over the Inquisition in Iberia to insure absolute conformity with Catholic beliefs in among Spaniards, especially the recent converts from Islam and Judaism made in the wake of the Reconquista. Like many other rulers, they saw it as their duty to defend the true faith in their kingdom, and feared political as well as spiritual consequences if they did not. It is important to understand that both kings and church leaders feared heresy as a real danger. They shared the anxiety of their contemporaries that their world was in danger, and behaved accordingly. Churchmen saw it as their duty to preserve the church, of course, but laymen were also convinced of this. Although monarchs fought with the church leaders for autonomy in their realms and were sometimes involved in very cynical political plots, they also feared for their souls, and recognized that one of their duties as Christian rulers was to preserve the faith, primarily with physical support of the spiritual authorities. That meant cooperating with the church in the apprehension of heretics, and the physical punishment of heretics (and later witches) when they were convicted by the church. From the mid-1100s there was a push from a more sophisticated and literate laity to have direct involvement in religious activities, especially the liturgy, and more access to the Scriptures, which were in Latin and not translated. (Translation was forbidden by church law.) Lay people wanted to be able to take a more active role in their salvation. Some clergy tried to oblige, sponsoring religious confraternities for laypeople that allowed them to take control of the distribution of charity (previously a clerical responsibility) and in plan and participate in major religious events, especially processions and displays of asceticism that mimicked the liturgies. But other clergy clung tightly to their privileges. By the 1400s, the church looked less impressive than it had in the 1100s. 1. The Black Death had killed off many clergy, and the wholesale replacement that occurred put many priests in place who were subpar. Better educated laymen were also less easily impressed. 2. The benefice system begun by the popes to supplement a failing papal tax system in the 1200s produced more clergy in parishes, especially in cities, who were less well educated than some of their parishioners. 3. Meanwhile, membership in monasteries was declining due to the greater wealth in society and increased opportunities—that is, families were not as willing to pledge their children to the monastic life. 4. Nevertheless, the existing monasteries controlled huge tracts of land and commanded commensurate income from them to support relatively few monks and nuns. 5. At various points in the 14th and 15th centuries, the popes were not resident in Rome, were engaged in wars and other temporal pursuits that seemed inappropriate, refused to solve the Great Schism, were imposing onerous taxes that seemed at odds with their apostolic office, and refused to call councils, which were equated with reform. 6. These and other problems provoked complaints from laypeople. -Clerical resistance to lay involvement and the declining quality of clergy encouraged more freethinking among the laity. The desire of so many laypeople to control their own salvation and live the apostolic life and clerical unwillingness to grant these led to some radicals to call for translation of the Latin Bible into the vernacular, the priesthood of all believers, and other changes in the church. In the late 1300s, the English priest John Wyclif (ca. 1320-1384) and his followers the Lollards were among the first to make such demands. By the 1400s Lollard beliefs had spread to Bohemia, where they gained many followers, especially among the Czechs. Called the Hussites because they followed the theologian John Hus (1369-1415), this group was subjected to a Crusade. They defended themselves much more successfully than the Cathars, and defeated five Crusading expeditions against them, 1420-1434, using novel tactics, including guns as a main weapon in the fighting. Moderate Hussites eventually negotiated with the King of Bohemia to retain their beliefs and practices, and several strains of Hussitism survive today. -The Great Schism (1378-1415) and its aftermath did not help the image of the papacy and the clergy in general. It led to about twenty years in which the General Council ran the church, with the pope serving as a kind of CEO. When autocratic popes took back control in the 1430s, starting with the imperious Pope Eugene IV (1431-1447), they tried to discredit the council as an institution, despite its long history as a tool of reform. This made these popes look like opponents of reform. At the same time, the papacy got deeply involved in the dynastic wars that had broken out in Italy. This made popes appear more interested in temporal goals than spiritual ones. By 1500s, the papacy had a much less attractive reputation than it did in 1100. -Despite an elaborate machinery to suppress heresy, non-standard views and doubt about religion increased. The spread of literacy helped here, as did the thrust of the new thinking. It focused on criticism of a clergy that was vulnerable. The church was also diverted from investigating heresy by a new concern. The Inquisition also spent a tremendous amount of energy investigating witchcraft, which became in European society from the late 1300s until the end of the 17th century. The sources of this anxiety are unclear, though some scholars have pointed to the disasters that struck Europe in the 14th century and the great shifts in society that ensued. -Throughout the Barbarian Period and after, common people had been engaging in magical acts to gain fertility for themselves and their land, curse enemies, etc. In most cases they were using methods that dated back to pagan times. The clergy saw these as attempts to gain the assistance of demonic powers, but the punishments meted out indicate that clergy viewed the situation with relative calm until the late 14th century. Then a significant change occurred. Many thinkers became convinced that demons were widespread and doing great damage to Christian society, luring both men and women into compacts with Satan that gave them great powers (which they often used to do evil) in exchange for their souls. This invisible army of witches and wizards (also called warlocks) was thought to be lurking at the edges of society, posing a constant threat. -This "Witch Craze," as historians call it, featured outbreaks of concern that would be met with rapid and massive intervention by the authorities. Many people were accused and many were punished after admitting their crime. The usual punishment, like that for heresy, was burning—quite different from the penalties in the pre-Craze period, when church authorities were much more relaxed about the problem. -The Reformed Churches of Protestantism discarded quite a number of Catholic beliefs, but they had no trouble retaining the Church's ideas about witchcraft. Prosecution of witches continued in Protestant lands for as long as they did in Catholic lands. It is important to remember that the last manifestation of the European Witch Craze occurred among the Calvinist colonists of Massachusetts in 1692. Europeans had a great deal of difficulty discarding these beliefs.

The major heresies of the Later Middle Ages (1100-1500 AD) incorporated some contemporary beliefs about perfection. Discuss the qualities you see in these heresies that people of the time might have considered "apostolic" (even if the heretics might not have).

The "two-tiered" conception of Christianity that had developed in the Barbarian and Feudal Periods became an issue among the inhabitants of Western Europe's towns after about 1150. Medieval towns were very tough places in which to survive, with inhabitants used to relying on their own efforts to gain what they needed. The community, at least the city government and infrastructure, rendered virtually no assistance (except from churches, which dispensed food and clothing much as "missions" do today.). This was quite different from the rural areas of feudal society, where the poor would be fit into the structure of the community in some way and given some kind of work. As the inhabitants of medieval towns preferred to rely on themselves to take care of their temporal needs, they also preferred to rely on themselves to see to their spiritual needs. In the country, Christians approached religion with relative passivity, depending on the clergy to insure salvation through the sacraments. City-dwellers wanted a more active role. They were particularly concerned about their wealth—the thing that kept them from destitution in the rough and tumble economic urban word. Having it seemed very much at odds with the model of perfection they had learned from the monastic theology most were exposed to. Their sense of guilt at being wealthy was also driven by the extremes of wealth and poverty in the towns—much greater than in the countryside—and by their need to engage in usury—forbidden as sinful by the church for several centuries—to do business effectively. This guilt led to a new conception of apostolic perfection. Fearing for their souls, some merchants decided to give their wealth to the poor and adopt a way of life that imitated Christ and the apostles. They do not seem to have consulted the clergy on these decisions, but to have taken them spontaneously because of some traumatic incident. The classic example of such a merchant is Waldo (or Valdes) of Lyons, a major city of Southern France, who in the 1170s decided to imitate Christ literally. He split his wealth with his wife, gave his share to the poor, paid a cleric to translate some of the Gospels' passages into the vernacular, and memorized these so that he could preach—that is, recite—them to people. He believed that in doing this he was preaching the Gospel to people the way Christ and the apostles had. (Medieval people had a strong sense of the power of God's Word spoken exactly as it was written.) In doing this, Waldo gathered a large following. They lived by begging and imitated Christ and the apostles even to the point of growing long hair and beards and wearing simple shifts belted with rough cord—the clothing of the very poor. They ignored clergy who protested that preaching was forbidden to the laity, and because of this, they were eventually condemned as heretics and driven out of Lyons by the bishop. In 1181, after Waldo appealed to the pope, the bishop's decision was approved by the pope and a General Council (being held at the city of Lyons). This did not faze Waldo and his followers, however. These "Waldensians" (as churchmen called them) convinced themselves that the church hierarchy that had condemned them and the laity who followed those leaders were themselves heretics who had lost the true teaching of Christ. In effect, they rejected the papal church. Waldensians thought that they were the only true Christians, a small remnant of the original church that had managed to preserve the truth of the Gospels even as all other "Christians" abandoned it. (This kind of thinking, found in many splinter groups in Christianity, is called "remnant theology.") Results: The church never could suppress the Waldensians. They moved into rural regions that were hard to get to. Despite hounding by the Inquisition, Waldensian communities survived in some areas of Southern France, Northern Italy, and Western Germany beyond the Middle Ages. A community was even found in foothills of the Alps in the 19th century. It revealed itself in the 1860s, after the Inquisition had been suppressed in Italy and a secular Italian state was offering government subsidies for the schools of all religions. They wanted government cash. It is important to note that: 1.) The Waldensians decided that the call of the Gospel to preach Christ's word superseded the need to obey ecclesiastical superiors. 2.) Like many early monks, Waldensians were concerned to save their own souls. 3.) Like many early monks, they also fit the contemporary layman's notion of what a holy person was better than most diocesan clergy. 4.) Unlike the majority of early monks, they refused to submit to the control of bishops and other clergy. Modern historians think the origins of the Cathar religion, which seems to have been a much more extreme departure from Catholic norms than Waldensianism, was also rooted at least partly in disillusionment with the behavior of the clergy of Southern France. Bishops in that area were known to be rapacious in collecting church taxes, and the peasants were very poor. Moreover, some of the clergy sent to serve the peasantry were less than perfect. It is perhaps not surprising that many peasants developed a different take on religion. By the time the church hierarchy became aware of them in the late 1100s, their views were quite different from those of Catholics. Cathars were "dualists," believing in a God of Good and a God of Evil. These two deities were in constant struggle. The God of Good created spirit, the God of Evil matter. Humans had the misfortune to be spirits trapped in a material body. Moral behavior required believers to avoid trapping spirit in matter, as in the conception of children, and to avoid overuse of material things, including food. It was understood that most people could not achieve perfection in pursuing these goals. Those who could were respected as religious leaders. They were called "perfects" because they displayed all the behaviors Cathars equated with morality. Ordinary Cathars were called "believers." The Cathars came to the attention of the church at the end of the 12th century. By the early 1200s there were enough of them dominating some regions of Southern France that the papacy first mobilized a large-scale missionary operation to win them back, and then a Crusade to destroy them (as we have seen). Though they disagreed radically with the Waldensians on many things, the Cathars' emphasis on poor behavior among ecclesiastical leaders is a telling link. It suggests that poverty was increasingly identified with true religious authority in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Explain the rise of the Crusade in the history of the Catholic Church. What brought it about? Where were Crusades carried on? How long did the idea of Crusade stay in favor among European Christians, and for what reasons? Why did it fall from favor?

The First Crusade (1095-1099), a holy war called by the pope that promised salvation for pious warriors who died in combat confessed, did not happen without some precedent. Since the late 800s, bishops and popes had urged Christian warriors to fight pagan attackers, promising that God would receive them into heaven if they died having confessed their sins before battle. The results were mixed. In the early 1000s more of these calls appeared, primarily because Western Christians were now pressing outward on their borders. The population of Europe was rising due to the agricultural improvements initiated by feudalism, and so was the number of trained knights, again due to the feudal system. The many sons of feudal lords who did not inherit a fief sought opportunities to capture one in war. They were drawn abroad, where victory meant capture and division of the loser's land into fiefs. By the mid-11th century, attacks on Muslim territories in Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and Southern Italy had led to conquest of those places, and the later decades saw the beginning of the "reconquest" (Reconquista) of Iberia from Muslim powers. By 1086, Christian rulers held half the peninsula. These wars probably would have happened anyway, but the promise of spiritual rewards certainly helped draw recruits. The attack on the Holy Land, however, was a special case. Most of the other expeditions aimed at targets close at hand; the eastern end of the Mediterranean was very much unknown country. Byzantine Emperors had been trying to draw Western European knights into their armies for several decades when the First Crusade began. They had even contacted pope in the hope that they would stir up support. But figures like Gregory VII were too busy with their struggles with the German emperors to pay attention. That changed, however, with Urban II (1088-1099). At the time he took the papal throne the reform popes were losing; they had been driven from Rome and were contending with an antipope appointed by the German emperor Henry IV. Urban had a natural flair for public relations. He moved to his native France and traveled around holding reform councils that highlighted his power over the church and the errors of Henry IV. He even bribed his way into Rome one Christmas to celebrate mass at St. John Lateran, the main church in the city at that time. As he traveled around, Urban kept running into pilgrims returning from the Holy Land who complained of mistreatment by the Seljuk (Saljuq) Turks, Muslim tribesmen who had recently conquered the area (from other Muslims—Arab Muslims had geld the area since 638). Urban decided to call a holy war to solve the recover the Holy Places. He laid out his reasons, as well as the usual promise of salvation to knights who died in the fighting, in the speech he delivered at a council at Clermont in November 1095. The failure of the Second Crusade (1146-1149) to recover important parts of Syria that had been taken back by the Muslim leader Zengi in the 1140s, and the failure of the Third Crusade (1187-1192) to win back the many territories lost to the united forces of Saladin in the 1180s, gave many people pause. When the Fourth Crusade (1204-1205) never got to its goal, but instead attacked and plundered Christian Constantinople and set up a Western kingdom there (1205-1261), some of the luster of the Crusade began to wear off. The failure of other Crusades to deal with the Mamluk campaign in the last decades of the 13th century (that drove Crusading forces of the mainland of Asia in 1291) did even more damage.

How did poverty figure in the way Christians thought about the perfection of Christ and the apostles in the centuries between 312 and 1650 AD? What changes occurred over that period, and why did they come about?

The Gospels were thought by early Christians to offer a picture of perfect behavior in the teachings and actions of Jesus. They believed Christ had deliberately modeled this to his followers to show them the way to salvation. Later Christians agreed that this model was the ideal, and often criticized other Christians who failed to follow it in one way or another—including their own Christian leaders. The true teachings on perfection found in the Gospels were ultimately a matter of doctrine, and so should be interpreted and Christian authorities--that is, the bishops, popes, councils, and fathers of the church. Eventually, some of these interpretations ended up in canon (church) law. They were considered part of the tradition that reflected the teaching of the Gospels, and Christians were bound to obey them. When certain interpretations of the behavior of Christ and the apostles were rejected by church authorities, they were identified as heresies, just as other beliefs were if they were thought to be erroneous. Just as certain beliefs and practices taught in the Gospels were considered to be essential to salvation for all Christians, others were identified as not essential, but still advisable for those who wished to be more certain of salvation. 1.) The essential teachings were called "precepts." 2.) The advisable but not required teachings were called "counsels." 3.) Christians who successfully followed the counsels as well as the precepts were often considered to be more perfect than those who only just followed the precepts. During the third century, asceticism—that is, extreme rejection of material things—became popular among Christians. Its devotees were called "anchorites" or "hermits" if they lived alone, "cenobites" if they lived in communities. The more general term for them was "monks" (monachi). Many Christians thought they were living the true life of Christ and the apostles—that is, that Christ and the apostles lived ascetically while Christ was preaching his message, fasting and observing common poverty. ("Common poverty" means possessing things only as a group, so that no one in the group can be said to have any personal property and no one can use anything without the permission of the group or the chosen leader of the group.) These Christians knew that the Gospels did not speak of this poverty, but were convinced that Christ and the apostles must have practiced it, especially in the periods that are not reported in the Gospels. Monastic practice soon settled on three main modes of behavior that allowed monks to pursue perfection more effectively: voluntary poverty, chastity, and obedience to the authority of their religious superiors. These, they thought, were the "counsels" that Christ and the apostles practiced. It was believed that these behaviors insured that monks' lives were perfect. Because of their reputation for perfection, monks became very revered teachers in the church from the 300s AD onward. Despite their vows of obedience, they occasionally clashed with bishops and other church leaders over church doctrines. And the laity was sometimes more willing to follow the teachings of the monks than those of the bishops because of their perceived holiness of life. This tension between monks and diocesan clergy became a particular problem in the Eastern Roman Empire. A good example is the rise of "Iconoclasm" in the late 600s. Eastern Orthodox monks originated this idea in the late 600s. (This was described in the outline for Week 7). Monasticism was better controlled in Western Europe, primarily because monasteries that wished to survive in the tumultuous world created by the barbarian tribes had to impose a strict discipline on their monks. Most monks in the West lived in cenobitic communities dominated by strong abbots. The Benedictine Rule, composed by Benedict of Nursia in 542 and circulated widely, helped insure this tight control over monasteries. As a result, the only potential rivals to bishops and other diocesan clergy in the West were abbots and the occasional hermit with a reputation for particular holiness. (Hermits existed in the West, but usually connected to a monastery. They had trouble surviving otherwise. The reality is that hermits do best in an area surrounded by believers who visit them for sermons and spiritual advice and who leave food and other offerings.) The establishment of so many monastic communities in the Western Europe after the fall of Rome led to monks dominating theological thinking there, especially the way people thought about morality. Monks tended to establish criteria for Christian behavior that fit their own situation rather than that of most laypeople. The laity found it impossible to observe the ethical exactitude monastic theologians declared necessary for salvation. -This led to what can be called a "two-tiered" conception of Christianity, with monks and nuns (who lived in a relatively controlled and artificial environment) perceived as perfect Christians, and the laity and diocesan clergy (who lived in the real world, which was full of temptations) as very imperfect. Many lay people came to believe they could not achieve heaven without the Last Rites being administered at the point of death, because so many of their actions were sinful (as they saw it). -Monastic theologians' scrupulous approach to morality of eventually led to the emergence of a very exact notion of Purgatory, a place where the souls of the saved had to go before they were admitted into heaven in order to purify them of the many sins they had committed. Purgatory was pictured much like Hell, except that the souls placed there knew they would eventually be freed to go to Heaven. Fear of the suffering to be faced in Purgatory led to the notion that prayers and masses could be offered to God to shorten a person's time there, and later to the idea that good works could be offered to insure the same result. -The last led to the papal practice of offering Indulgences. The concept behind Indulgences was that great saints had died with many more good works than they needed, and that the pope, who had control over all the faithful until they entered Heaven or Hell, could apply these good works to souls in Purgatory as Vicar of Christ. Gradually, the "good works" people did were mostly cash payments to the papacy, and the recipients were those who were paying the cash. In effect, people were trying to buy off the punishment for sins they had committed. [Martin Luther and others in his time found this practice repellent, a way of buying salvation. The proclamation of the sale of Indulgences in his area of Germany prompted Luther's first attack on the papal church, his "Ninety-Five Theses" that questioned papal authority to offer indulgences or control other aspects of Christian life.] -Waldenesians As the inhabitants of medieval towns preferred to rely on themselves to take care of their temporal needs, they also preferred to rely on themselves to see to their spiritual needs. In the country, Christians approached religion with relative passivity, depending on the clergy to insure salvation through the sacraments. City-dwellers wanted a more active role. They were particularly concerned about their wealth—the thing that kept them from destitution in the rough and tumble economic urban word. Having it seemed very much at odds with the model of perfection they had learned from the monastic theology most were exposed to. Their sense of guilt at being wealthy was also driven by the extremes of wealth and poverty in the towns—much greater than in the countryside—and by their need to engage in usury—forbidden as sinful by the church for several centuries—to do business effectively. This guilt led to a new conception of apostolic perfection.

Why can it be said that the papacy and the Catholic Church's clergy were caught in a bind by the new religious ideas of the Later Middle Ages (1100-1500 AD), especially those regarding "apostolic perfection"?

The church's response to the trend toward poverty and the apostolic life among some Catholics was to accept as legitimate religious orders new groups that were not so different from the Waldensians in their basic beliefs about poverty. The papacy did not give up the wealth that it felt was necessary to run the machinery of the church, but rather added to the religious orders of the church two (and later more) that practiced extreme poverty. They lived by begging, or mendicancy, and so were called "mendicant orders." The first mendicant order was the Franciscans, founded by the son of an Italian merchant, Francis of Assisi (1182-1225) in 1205. Francis wished to serve God by preaching the Gospel and by observing the most complete poverty he could imagine—to have nothing at all, not even the goods in common that religious orders like the Benedictines had. Every day he begged for his sustenance and gave what was left over to the poor. This was like the poverty he saw in the streets of Assisi, a poverty even greater than anything that could be found in the countryside. Country communities, because of their cohesive nature, tended to provide anyone who was thought to belong to the community by birth or history some function and some living, no matter how meager. The cities had no such sense of community, and the indigent lived from hand to mouth. The church helped with the equivalent of soup kitchens, but the poverty Francis saw, and wanted to share, must have been grim. Francis gathered a small band of followers and quickly gained a reputation for both holiness and for brilliance as a preacher. He never tried to become a cleric, because he said he wished to remain as humble as possible, and the clerical rank would have given him stature above what he felt he was worthy of. Some might have seen this as an implicit criticism of the clergy, especially as Francis claimed he was imitating Christ and the apostles, but Francis apparently disarmed criticism with his honesty and simplicity. Born the year after Waldo was condemned, and perhaps aware of what had happened to the Waldensians, Francis was always careful to profess obedience to the clergy when he and his followers began to travel about preaching. (He and his fellow "friars," or "brothers," were laymen.) As a result, Pope Innocent III was impressed with his sincerity and made the Franciscans an official religious order in 1215—despite an official policy he had put in place designed to reduce the number of new religious orders. The second mendicant order was the Dominicans, which was also made an official order by Innocent III in 1215. The Dominicans were founded by the Spanish preacher Dominic Guzman (d.1220), who had his followers dress simply and live by begging much like Francis had his order in order to gain the acceptance of Cathars, whom he wished to convert back to Catholicism. Over the next century, these two mendicant (begging) orders grew into the biggest orders in the church except for the Benedictines. They became very popular, and inspired other orders that were organized along similar lines and dedicated to preaching and mendicancy (notably the Augustinians and Carmelites). The Dominicans and Franciscans quickly proved their worth to the papacy in preaching against the Cathars and the Waldensians, as they behaved rather like both the Waldensians and the Cathars' "perfects," and so got immediate respect from people accustomed to that kind of holy man. The mendicant orders had a huge impact on the practice of religion in the Later Middle Ages. They revolutionized preaching, making it more direct, personal, and entertaining. Their preachers had huge followings and drew enormous crowds. They called on Christians to take control of their salvation and to undertake good works where they could. This was just the message city-dwellers in particular wanted to hear. They were people not used to accepting their status in the world, as country folk were forced to. City-dwellers hustled for their living and their place in the world, and they lived without safety nets. They wanted to have a sense of control in their journey toward salvation. As a result of the work of the mendicants, a new kind of spirituality emerged in the 13th century, one much more focused on the subjective relation of the individual to Christ. It was a religion of emotion and of sentiment that centered on a close personal relationship with Christ—something quite different from the religiosity of Feudal Age, when sinners trembled before an awesome and frightening Deity. Though these mendicant orders met an immediate need, they also created new problems. Their claims to follow a more perfect way of life than anyone else triggered negative reactions from monastic theologians and especially from the diocesan (or "secular") clergy, who did not even take a vow of poverty, but considered themselves proper observers of Christ's perfection. In a church that believed that all the truths of the faith had been given at its creation, the introduction of seemingly new beliefs was bound to create trouble—in this case, ideas about Christ's true perfection. The mendicants might satisfy some of the spiritual needs of lay people, but they seemed to some clergy to be heretical. The key problem was that the claims of the Franciscans and Dominicans suggested that they were observing a counsel of Christ that had not been observed for most of the church's history. Counsels were the teachings that Christ gave the church to allow people to achieve not just a minimal salvation (precepts taught these), but also a higher perfection. The Franciscans claimed that their individual and common poverty was the practice most conducive to this perfection, and implied that those who didn't practice it would not achieve that perfection. This created another problem. It implied that this teaching had not been taught or practiced by the church for most of its history—that is, since the time of the apostles. The common conception of the church saw it as perfectly maintaining all of the teachings of Christ since the founding of the church, so the Franciscan teaching contradicted this and implied that the church had been imperfect. Some Franciscans actually embraced this idea, suggesting that St. Francis had some special revelation from God to bring this teaching back to the church. That directly challenged the church's worthiness as a vessel of Christ's message, and sat like a time bomb underneath the debates Franciscans carried on with the representatives of other religious and the secular clergy over the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Secular Unrest By the 1250s, the secular clergy were attacking the mendicants in earnest. The seculars' war of words questioned not only the truth of the mendicants' interpretation of the Scriptures in regard to Christ's poverty, but also the papacy's power to recognize the legitimacy of those teachings and to alter the organization of the church to accommodate the mendicants as ministers of Christ. They attacked the papacy's right to insert orders like the Franciscans into the structure of the church established by Christ—something the papacy in fact had been doing since the 1230s. The champions of the seculars claimed, in effect, that the Franciscans and Dominicans were usurping the rights of the secular clergy to minister to the people of God—rights bestowed by Christ. The papacy, they said, did not have the power to overturn or dispense with rights granted directly by Christ. In doing so, they contrasted starkly the power of the papacy and the power of Christ, questioning the limits of the papal monarch and the extent of his theocratic powers. At a practical level, the secular clergy were reacting not only to the claims to perfection made by the Franciscans and their huge rise in popularity with the laity (who now preferred them to secular priests as preachers and confessors), but also to the papacy's decision to give the mendicants permission to preach in all dioceses—a power usually reserved to individual bishops. The popes, of course, saw their actions as perfectly consonant with their authority as papal theocrats, and believed they could alter the structure of the church's clergy when they thought it best for the church. But the secular clergy disagreed—vehemently—and that created considerable trouble. They published many tracts during their dispute with the papacy that questioned the extent of papal authority claimed by popes. Some historians see this "secular-mendicant dispute" as the beginning of a pushback by bishops and diocesan priests against the enormous claims to authority that had been made by the popes in the wake of the Papal Revolution. These claims continued to be pressed by bishops in the 1300s, and were soon taken up by kings as they attempted to curtail the popes' powers and build their "national churches" at just this time. [The tracts the seculars wrote against papal power stayed in circulation, providing ammunition for later dissidents. Slowly, an anti-papal argument began to build in Europe, a set of reasons the popes should hot control the church. Dissidents dipped into the tracts of the secular writers and others freely as they framed their attacks.] The Spirituals Conflicts about the proper observance of perfection grew not just between the mendicant orders and other religious orders, but within the mendicants orders, especially the Franciscans. A rigorist faction called the "Spirituals" or "Spiritual Franciscans" appeared among the Franciscans around 1300 that demanded the order live in very extreme poverty. Another faction, the Conventuals, who spoke for most of the order and dominated the leadership, thought this was unnecessary. Eventually the conflict ended up before Pope Clement V (1305-1314), who was asked to decide who was correct. In 1312 at the General Council of Vienne, Clement declared that extreme poverty was not necessary for Franciscans. The Spirituals refused to accept the judgment, and when Clement's successor, Pope John XXII (1316-1334), attempted to enforce the decision, the Spirituals condemned the Roman church as the "***** of Babylon" predicted in the Book of Revelations, a supposed precursor to the Antichrist. Pope John was quick to condemn the Spirituals, and by 1318 had declared them heretics and set the Inquisition on them. However, his concern to solve the problem quickly led to a new one. Pope John seems to have thought the teachings of the Franciscans about the "absolute" poverty of Christ and the apostles were a source of potential heresy, and decided to examine them. He did not think they were heresy, but did suspect that they either contained errors or were phrased in such a way as to cause people like the Spirituals to fall into error and eventual heresy. The usual procedure in examining suspected errors was to gather advice from important theologians, and when he did this, he roused the ire of the Franciscan leaders (whom John had sided with against the Spirituals). The Franciscan leaders claimed that Christ's poverty was indeed "absolute"—that he possessed nothing at all, either as an individual or in common with the apostles and his other followers. Non-Franciscan theologians that John consulted argued that this was impossible and therefore false. Pope John considered their arguments and eventually decided against the Franciscans. He condemned the idea of Christ's "absolute" poverty in 1323. The Franciscan leadership protested Pope John's decree, and in 1328 the leaders of the Franciscan Order fled Avignon to the court of the German Emperor Louis IV (who was at war with the pope). The rest of the Franciscan Order generally tried to avoid this conflict, but the half dozen or so very prominent Franciscans who fled did much damage to the Avignon popes, especially the noted theologian and philosopher William of Ockham. They produced a torrent of writings that accused their papal opponents of heresy and questioned their fitness to rule the church. Pope John and his successors never changed their minds, but the attacks on papal authority that were unleashed in the writings of the "dissident" Franciscans had a big effect on later ideas about the powers of the council and the importance of the pope in relation to the whole church. Like the secular tracts against the papacy of the late 1200s, they stayed in circulation for decades and influenced public opinion against the popes. More Damage to the Image of the Popes As these Franciscan works were widely disseminated in late medieval Europe (long after the fight over Franciscan poverty was resolved), their accusations eventually hurt the image of the popes. True or not, the accusations created stereotypes that stuck. In particular, their criticism of clerical wealth helped fan attacks on the clergy that questioned their right to be successors of the apostles. In the 1380s, the followers of the English priest John Wyclif (the Lollards) declared that only clergy in a state of grace had any authority over good Christians. They demanded translations of the Scriptures to allow all Christians to interpret his words for themselves, just as the first followers of Christ had. In the early 1400s, Wyclif's ideas were spread to Bohemia. The Bohemian Wycliffites, called Hussites after their leader John Hus, were declared heretics but refused to give up their beliefs. Five Crusading expeditions sent by the papacy to wipe the Hussites out as the Cathars had been were defeated in turn by Hussite forces, and the moderates among them were eventually able to negotiate a treaty with the secular leaders of Bohemia that allowed them to practice some of their beliefs. Meanwhile, their critiques of the papacy, which focused on the great wealth of the popes and their failure to maintain the doctrines of Christ on apostolic perfection, helped turn many Christians against papal authority over the next century. Luther would tap into this disaffection in his works against the papacy a century later. Results The entire history of the Christian Church is filled with attempts to achieve reform of some sort, but this is especially true of the Later Medieval Period, the years from 1000 to 1500. The papal reformers of the 1000s were trying to restore Christ's true teaching on clerical perfection when their attacked simony, clerical marriage, and lay investiture. They tried very hard to bring the church back to apostolic perfection over the next two centuries, and were willing to adapt to new perceptions of that perfection, as they did in accepting the mendicant orders as true representatives of Christian life in the early 1200s. But they ran into trouble with the mendicant movement of the 13th century. Conceptions of perfection championed by the mendicants that resonated so well with the laity in fact contradicted long-held beliefs about the structure of the church. The popes backed the mendicants because of their apparent ability to spearhead a reform of the lives of the laity, but failed to foresee the reaction of their own diocesan clergy. As a result, the popes were here caught in a complex clash of medieval values in the years after 1250. 1.) The mendicants claimed the perfection of Christ and the apostles came from living as mendicants. 2.) Franciscans went further, saying it came from living as Franciscans did, poor as individuals and as a group. 3.) That suggested that the popes should shift reform in that direction, altering the structure of the church's organization to fit in the mendicants. . But the traditions of the church that were also supposed to preserve Christ and the apostles' teachings said nothing about the claims of the Franciscans. 4.) Had the church failed to preserve those vital teachings of the church over most of the church's history, as the Franciscan beliefs implied? That could be interpreted as heresy. 5.) Everyone new that the majority of the clergy had never lived that way. Were the clergy to be reformed and forced to live as Franciscans? 6.) That didn't seem practical. The values of medieval society demanded that persons of authority like bishops and popes display wealth and seem to spend it freely to maintain respect and credibility. 7.) What would happen to the place the papal reformers had carved out in the rough and tumble world of medieval rulers if they were to suddenly embrace the poverty the Franciscans preached? Could they command respect, and how could they resist kings who chose to dominate them? They would have no money or armies to defend themselves. 8.) The popes chose to steer a middle course on these issues over the 13th and 14th centuries, and paid a price. 9.) They incurred the wrath of Franciscan extremists, who branded them heretics and corruptors of the church. 10.) They also suffered the anger of some of the laity, who hurled similar criticisms at them after being influenced by Franciscan thinking. The popes and the rest of the clergy were also on the horns of a dilemma over the demands being made by many laymen to be given an active role in the religious system. 1.) They knew the clergy had been established as the leaders of the Christian community early on in the church's history. 2.) The Papal Revolution had cemented the clergy's position of leadership and tightly defined their authority. 3.) If the lay demands were implemented, clerical powers have to be redefined and, in some cases, transferred to the laity? 4.) The Scriptures had been interpreted for centuries as supporting clerical authority. These new ideas seemed to question the church's interpretation of Scripture. 5.) The response of the clergy to these demands was mixed, but in the end failed to satisfy extremists. 6.) The disasters that befell Europe in the 1300s led to rapid shifts in lay spirituality, and accelerated lay demands for greater inclusion in the sacramental and liturgical functioning of the church, and more critical of clerical failings. 7.) The popes failure to respond to calls for reforming councils, especially after 1440, not only marked them in some people's minds as unwilling to reform the church, but also as out of step with evolving European governmental standards. For several centuries, secular governments had been using representative bodies analogous to the church council as part of decision-making. 8.) Thus the attempts of the clergy to maintain the traditions of church order and hierarchy while at the same time responding to new needs of the church failed in significant ways, and this led to a crisis of faith in the clerical establishment. 9.) By the early 1500s, Luther's idea that there was no special priesthood, but a "priesthood of all believers" made great sense to many Christians. So it was that conflicting notions of reform and of apostolic perfection that emerged in the Later Middle Ages did as much to undermine the status of the Catholic clergy as the more obvious problems: clerical laxity, papal excesses (especially in the political struggles in Italy) and refusal to call councils, sale of indulgences, and any number of other real failings that afflicted the church in that period. The failures were real, but underlying them was an increasing perception by many that the church's leadership had lost sight of its true purpose and was betraying its calling and the interests of the church itself. These perceptions drew people to Protestantism after Luther raised the call. The real problem was that the church's ultimate salvific purpose, or at least the obvious means to that purpose, had been obscured over the centuries after the Papal Revolution in a tangle of conflicting secondary objectives—papal theocracy, control of Italy, reform through new orders that appealed to shifting conceptions of Christian perfection—all of which had been undertaken with the best of intentions. Given the many conflicting problems by 1500, one wonders whether the broad-scale reform of the Catholic Church—the housecleaning that happened at the Council of Trent—could ever have happened without the existence of a mortal threat like Protestantism. Only a danger like that—the specter of imminent destruction—could snap the church's leadership into focus. And it did, though perhaps "snap" is the wrong word for what happened. It took more two decades after the appearance of Protestantism for the papacy to find a leader with the fortitude to mount an adequate response—a response that would profoundly alter the church in many ways—and a whole new generation of Catholic leaders to implement it. The result was a Catholic Church reborn, a church that rebounded and flourished into the modern era.

How well did the Catholic Church's authorities protect the Jews in the Later Middle Ages (1100-1500 AD)? What were the reasons the Jews needed protection?

To keep Jews and Christians apart, Jews were required to wear identifying badges. This supposedly protected Christians from them. At the same time, the church enjoined its officials to protect Jewish communities from attacks by Christian zealots, and forbade forced baptisms, interference in Jewish festivals, and Christians bearing witness against Jews (as Jews were forbidden to bear witness against Jews) -In some provinces, a difference in dress distinguishes the Jews or Saracens from the Christians, but in certain others such a confusion has grown up that they cannot be distinguished by any difference. Thus it happens that at times that through error Christians have relations with the women of Jews or Saracens, and Jews and Saracens with Christian women. Therefore, that they may not, under pretext of error of this sort, excuse themselves in the future for the excesses of such prohibited intercourse, we decree that such Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress. -Moreover, during the last three days before Easter and especially on Good Friday, they shall not go forth in public at all, for the reason that some of them on these very days, as we bear, do not blush to go forth better dressed and are not afraid to mock the Christians who maintain the memory of the most holy Passion by wearing signs of mourning -This, however, we forbid most severely, that any one should presume at all to break forth in insult to the Redeemer. And since we ought not to ignore any insult to Him who blotted out our disgraceful deeds, we command that such impudent fellows be checked by the secular princes by imposing them proper punishment so that they shall not at all presume to blaspheme Him who was crucified for us At this time arrogant people, a people of strange speech, a nation bitter and impetuous, Frenchmen and Germans, set out for the Holy City, which had been desecrated by barbaric nations, there to seek their house of idolatry and banish the lsmaelites and other denizens of the land and conquer the land for themselves. They decorated themselves prominently with their signs, placing a profane symbol — a horizontal line over a vertical one — on ' the vestments of every man and woman whose heart yearned to go on the stray path to the grave of their Messiah. Their ranks swelled until the number of men, women and children exceeded a locust horde covering the earth; of them it was said: 'The locusts have no king.' Now it came to pass that as they passed through the towns where Jews dwelled, they said to one another: 'Look now, we are going a long way to seek out the profane shrine and to avenge ourselves on the Ismaelites, when here, in our very midst, are the Jews — they whose forefathers murdered and crucified him for no reason. Let us first avenge ourselves on them from among the nations so that the name of Israel will no longer be remembered, or let them adopt our faith and acknowledge the offspring of promiscuity.' When the Jewish communities became aware of their intentions, they resorted to the custom of our ancestors, repentance, prayer and charity. . . . On the twenty-third day of Iyar they [the crusaders] attacked the com-munity of Worms. The community was then divided into two groups; some remained in their homes and others fled to the local bishop seeking refuge. Those who remained in their homes were set upon by the steppe-wolves who pillaged men, women and infants, children and old people. They pulled down the stairways and destroyed the houses, looting and plundering; and they took the Torah Scroll, trampled it in the mud, and tore and burned it. The enemy devoured the children of Israel with open maw.

Why was going on Crusade considered a religious act in 12th-century Europe? Note all the religious aspects of the Crusade in your answer.

a holy war called by the pope that promised salvation for pious warriors who died in combat confessed, did not happen without some precedent. Since the late 800s, bishops and popes had urged Christian warriors to fight pagan attackers, promising that God would receive them into heaven if they died having confessed their sins before battle. The results were mixed. In the early 1000s more of these calls appeared, primarily because Western Christians were now pressing outward on their borders. The population of Europe was rising due to the agricultural improvements initiated by feudalism, and so was the number of trained knights, again due to the feudal system. The many sons of feudal lords who did not inherit a fief sought opportunities to capture one in war. They were drawn abroad, where victory meant capture and division of the loser's land into fiefs. By the mid-11th century, attacks on Muslim territories in Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and Southern Italy had led to conquest of those places, and the later decades saw the beginning of the "reconquest" (Reconquista) of Iberia from Muslim powers. By 1086, Christian rulers held half the peninsula. These wars probably would have happened anyway, but the promise of spiritual rewards certainly helped draw recruits. The attack on the Holy Land, however, was a special case. Most of the other expeditions aimed at targets close at hand; the eastern end of the Mediterranean was very much unknown country. Byzantine Emperors had been trying to draw Western European knights into their armies for several decades when the First Crusade began. They had even contacted pope in the hope that they would stir up support. But figures like Gregory VII were too busy with their struggles with the German emperors to pay attention. That changed, however, with Urban II (1088-1099). At the time he took the papal throne the reform popes were losing; they had been driven from Rome and were contending with an antipope appointed by the German emperor Henry IV. Urban had a natural flair for public relations. He moved to his native France and traveled around holding reform councils that highlighted his power over the church and the errors of Henry IV. He even bribed his way into Rome one Christmas to celebrate mass at St. John Lateran, the main church in the city at that time. As he traveled around, Urban kept running into pilgrims returning from the Holy Land who complained of mistreatment by the Seljuk (Saljuq) Turks, Muslim tribesmen who had recently conquered the area (from other Muslims—Arab Muslims had geld the area since 638). Urban decided to call a holy war to solve the recover the Holy Places. He laid out his reasons, as well as the usual promise of salvation to knights who died in the fighting, in the speech he delivered at a council at Clermont in November 1095. The First Crusade's success gave the reform papacy a huge boost in public opinion. The German emperor had been winning his war with the popes until 1099; now people began to believe that the papacy did have a mandate from God. The capture of Jerusalem seemed to them miraculous. Popes were able to use this rise in public sentiment to create truces with the kings of Europe over ending of lay investiture, the appointment of clergy by rulers. Treaties were signed with the French and English kings in 1106 1n 1107, and with the German ruler in 1122. From that point, the papacy was on the rise as a factor in Europe's politics. When the Crusades began to fail later in the 12th century, the popes had moved to other accomplishments that drew support—such as their very efficient and rational judicial system—so they did not lose popularity as a result. But they continued to support Crusades for the next several centuries, even as the Crusades became less and less popular. From the limits of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has spread and has time and again been brought to our ears: namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians—an accursed race, a race utterly alien- ated from God, a nation which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God—has invaded the lands of the Christians of the Holy Land and has massacred them by sword, pillage, and fire. They have led some of them into their own country as slaves, and have murdered others by the cruelest tortures. They have destroyed outright many of God's churches and have appropriated others for their own religion. They have shattered altars, after first defiling them with their uncleanness. With force they circumcise the Christians, and the blood of these circumcisions they spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal fonts. When they decide to torture people to death, they puncture their navels, pull out one of their intestines, and bind it to a stake; then they beat and flog their victims around the stake until the viscera gush forth and the wretches collapse dead to the ground. Others they bind to posts and riddle with arrows. They stretch out the necks of others and hack through them with a single blow of their swords. What shall I say of the despicable rape of the women? No, no—to speak of it would be worse than to remain silent. The kingdom of the Greeks lies dismembered by these people, and so much of its land has been lost that one could not traverse it all in two months' solid marching. To whom, then, has the duty of avenging these evils and recovering this land fallen, if not to you? You, upon whom God has bestowed more outstanding glory in arms, more greatness in courage, more vitality and strength than anyone else, all in order that you might bring down the brutes who resist you. So let the deeds of your ancestors inspire you and incite your minds to acts of courage: the glory and greatness of King Charles the Great [Charle-magne], and of his son Louis, and of all your other kings who have van- quished the realms of the pagans, and have extended in those lands the reach of the Holy Church. Let the Holy Sepulcher of the Lord Our Savior, which is now in the hands of unclean nations, especially incite you, along with the holy places which are being humiliated and polluted by their filthiness. 0 most valiant soldiers, descendants of invincible ancestors all, do not fail us! Bear in mind always the valor of your fathers! But if your love of your children, parents, and wives should get in the way, remember what the Lord says in the Gospel: "No one who prefers father or ' mother to me is worthy of me; no one who prefers son or daughter to me is worthy of me; anyone who does not take his cross and follow in my footsteps is not worthy of me." And also: "All those who have forsaken their houses, brethren, sisters, fathers, mothers, wives, children, and lands for my sake shall receive a hundred-fold and shall inherit everlasting life." Therefore don't let your possessions detain you, nor worry about your mundane affairs; for this land that you inhabit, enclosed as it is on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too small for your vast population; neither does it abound in wealth; and it produces barely enough food for those who live here. That is why you murder and devour one another; why you wage war on each other; and why you so often destroy each other. Therefore let your hatred go; let your quarrels end; let your wars cease; and put all your conflicts and arguments aside. Enter the road to the Holy Sepulcher. Win back the Holy Land from the wicked, and place it under your own dominion—for that land which, as the Scriptures say, "flows with milk and honey," was given by God Himself into the hands of the children of Israel. Jerusalem is the center of the world. The land is fruitful beyond all others, like a paradise of delights. This land Our Redeemer has ennobled by His advent, beautified by His presence, consecrated by His suffering, redeemed by His death, and glorified by His burial. This royal city, we repeat, located at the center of the world, is held captive by His enemies and is being sub¬jected to the worship of heathens who do not know God. She [Jerusalem] therefore desires and cries out for her liberty, and never ceases to implore you to come to her assistance. She asks this aid of you especially, since, as we have already said, God has bestowed upon you, above all other nations, great glory in arms. Accordingly, you should undertake this journey for the remis¬sion of your sins, and with the assurance of the eternal glory of the Kingdom of Heaven.