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Church History, Volume Two: From Pre-Reformation to the Present Day

the rise and growth of the church in its cultural, intellectual, and political context

ZONDERVAN

CHAPTER 1

European Christianity in an Age of Adversity, Renaissance, and Discovery

I. INTRODUCTION

Should history be viewed as a succession of random events whose ultimate causes are irretrievably lost to us? Do history's days become years and its years become centuries, with no alpha or starting point to have launched them and no omega or final consummation to end them? Or did "history" begin? Is it heading toward a climactic ending? Put another way, do the events of days, years, and centuries, when contemplated through the eyes of faith, reveal not utter randomness but designs following a divine master plan?

Many Europeans during the Middle Ages thought they could discern divine patterns stitched into the warp and woof of their own personal experience and into the history of their respective societies. A few believed they knew how many years had passed since the creation of the world and between Christ's life and their own times.

More generally, Europeans assumed God was at work in their world accomplishing his purposes. Not only is the earth God's creation, but what happens in this ephemeral experience called life is somehow bound to the world of the spirit, that is, reality. This life with its toils and tears is but an antechamber for the next.

Medieval Europeans faced the serious problem of explaining the origin of evil within their world without making God its ultimate author. They worried about how to protect themselves from disasters caused by the seemingly whimsical forces of nature. Did God use disease, or the storms that ruined crops, or the accidents that overtook weary travelers, to display his anger regarding their sins? Or should they attribute any mishap or tragedy to other forces, to nature's untamed power, to Satan's malignancy, to the malevolent devices of witches and warlocks, to the potency of black and white magic, to certain conjunctures of the planets and stars, to fate, or to the wheel of fortune? Were their souls and nature joined in some kind of "chain of being"?

The clergy sometimes fretted and complained about the "ungodly" practices the laity relied on in attempting to fend off evil, whether sickness or death, bad weather, or accidents.

Complicating matters still further, the life cycle of millions of Europeans was dramatically interrupted by deadly perturbations. Indeed, if troubles encountered on earth count as evidence, large numbers of Europeans had every reason to conclude that God was angry with the children of Adam. Europeans experienced wrenching crises tearing roughly at their own personal lives and the fabric of their social, cultural, and religious institutions. The distinguished medievalist Robert Lerner has labeled the fourteenth century the "Age of Adversity."

The period 1300–1500 began ominously for the Western church with the so-called "Babylonian Captivity of the Church" (1309–77) that directly challenged its long-standing traditions and institutional identity because the papacy moved from Rome to Avignon (at the time on the French border). The period concluded on the eve of the "Protestant Reformation," which represented another momentous challenge to the Western church as an international institution. In the intervening years, the unity of the Western church was painstakingly pieced back together again, despite the "Great Schism," only to be shattered afresh by the Protestant Reformation. Powerful Protestant churches emerged outside of Italy. Protestant spokespersons claimed to preach the "pure gospel."

Whether the Babylonian Captivity of the Church combined with the Great Schism (1378–1417) served as a long-range cause of the Protestant Reformation remains a point of debate. Nevertheless, the disruptive nature of these two institutional dislocations leaves no doubt about at least one point: the late Middle Ages (c. 1300–1500) was a perilous period for the Western church's unity and for the survival of papal pretentions to dominate European political, social, and religious life. Moreover, during this same time frame the Eastern Byzantine Church suffered a devastating blow with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.

II. A PIVOTAL TIME OF STRUGGLE WITHIN AND OUTSIDE OF THE CHURCH

A. The Epochal Tragedies of Massive Deaths

This period also witnessed epochal demographic dislocations for millions of Europeans. Sudden and unexpected death became even more prevalent as a fearsome specter, indiscriminately stalking kings and queens, popes and peasants. The ravages of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) and other bloody conflicts devastated entire towns and regions. The introduction of gunpowder around 1400 changed longstanding patterns of warfare. Cannons could blow holes in fortified castle walls. A lowly peasant could fell a knight with musket-shot. Cannonballs and bullets could sometimes kill and wound from a greater distance than an arrow could be shot (though the arrow was often more accurate).

Perhaps even more sinister and unpredictable, waves of famines (1315–17; 1340–50; 1374–75) and plagues such as the Black Death (1347–50) swept like apocalyptic scourges through Europe, turning entire cities and countrysides into silent death zones. Scholars debate whether the Black Death was due to bubonic plague (with fleas and black cats the carriers) or whether it issued from an Ebola-like virus or even from anthrax.

On May 19, 1348, the great Italian writer Petrarch wrote to his brother about the almost unimaginable desolation caused by the Black Death:

My brother! My brother! Alas what shall I say? Whither shall I turn? I would that I had never been born, or at least had died before these times. How will posterity believe that there has been a time, without lightnings of heaven or fires of earth, without wars or other visible slaughter, not this or that part of the earth, but well-nigh the whole globe has remained without inhabitants? When before has it been seen that houses are left vacant, cities deserted, fields are too small for the dead, and a fearful and universal solitude over the whole earth?

What was apparently the bubonic plague had arrived in Messina, Sicily, the year before, when twelve Genovese trading ships arrived, their crews already dying from the disease. So devastating were its effects in Messina that "Corpses were abandoned in empty houses and there was none to give them Christian burial."

At the inception of the plague, about 1348, the population of England numbered approximately 3,700,000. By 1377 it had plummeted to 2,000,000. As one contemporary observed, the plague reaped an especially plentiful and deadly harvest in overcrowded London: "So great a multitude eventually died there, that all the cemeteries of the aforesaid city were insufficient for the burial of the dead. For which reason very many were compelled to bury their dead in places unseemly and not hallowed or blessed; for some, it was said, cast the corpses into the river." On the Continent, a similar story was often repeated.

European demographic statistics for this period coldly reveal one of the greatest disasters humanity has ever experienced. Toward 1347 the population of Europe was approximately 75 million. By 1400, however, the population had fallen by 33–40 percent—more than 25 million people. Some historians grimly suggest that in 1450 the population of Europe may have actually been only one-third to one-half of what it was in 1300.

Seeking to explain these catastrophes, more than a few Europeans speculated that the calamities were related to God's judgment for their own sins and for the papacy's departure from Rome and the scandal of the Great Schism. These catastrophes were proof positive of God's anger for the church's sins. And if they were, what could Europeans do to assuage God's ire? Should groups of the faithful engage in forms of collective penance by going on new crusades or pilgrimages, or by forming confraternities whose members would beat their bodies in a penitential attempt to atone for their own sins and those of other Europeans?

After the Black Death a number of individuals practiced rigorous forms of hermit life, seclusion, asceticism, and mysticism in which they sometimes sought their own salvation (while not dissociating completely from the Catholic Church, even though they believed it stood in need of considerable reform). Women mystics like Birgitta of Sweden (1303–73) and Catherine of Siena (1347–80) boldly admonished and warned popes directly about the papacy's "sins." Devotions directed toward the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, became even more prominent. The faithful hoped that Mary might intercede with her Son in their behalf. The number of saints to whom the faithful could appeal for help and blessing increased.

Paradoxically enough, this same period (1300–1500), with its demographic and ecclesiastical tragedies, is simultaneously noteworthy for its innovative achievements in architecture, sculpture, and painting, its reforms in educational curricula, and its fascination with and recovery of Greek and Roman manuscripts—traits we often associate with the "Renaissance," or cultural "rebirth." The Renaissance in turn stimulated a number of the concerns dear to reforming Catholics as well as those who broke with the church and became Protestants. Likewise, European explorers ventured forth and discovered "new" lands, Constantinople fell to the Turks (1453), and Moscow emerged as a "Third Rome," the center of Russian Orthodoxy.

During the same centuries, western "schoolmen" engaged in sturdy theological reflection, often battling each other in hard-hitting controversies and disputations. Lay movements also assumed a larger role in the life of the church. Confraternities became especially widespread in Italy after the Black Death, and some 150 parish fraternities formed in London, a number of which were also created in response to the plague. These groups often engaged in exemplary acts of Christian charity and pursued rigorous forms of Roman Catholic asceticism and devotion especially directed toward the Virgin Mary, St. Catherine, and St. Anne. In the last decades of the fifteenth century, the number of priests grew significantly after a steep decline during the period of the Great Schism.

In a word, the religious, social, and political life of the period 1300–1500 defies facile characterizations. It was transfixed by conflicting and contradictory movements and events. The experiences of people living in one region of Europe might be relatively placid and calm, while contemporaneously in another area the local population was literally decimated by war, famine, or the plague.

B. The Papacy: Plunged into a State of Crisis

In the first decade of the fourteenth century, the Catholic Church encountered especially turbulent political seas. Individual popes and prelates found navigating these troubled waters all the more treacherous due to swirling crosscurrents set in motion by a number of monarchs. An international Respublica Christiana, or "Christian republic," ostensibly bound together by Europeans' loyalty to the empire or to the papacy, did not appear capable of withstanding burgeoning aspirations of kings and princes for political independence. A unified Christendom seemed destined to founder and to yield to a more nebulous "commonwealth" of independent Christian nation-states. Indeed, in some regions primary loyalties to kings in nation-states or to princes in city-states had already superseded older loyalties of the laity to emperors or to Christ's Vicar on earth, the pope.

This development became painfully obvious to a number of observers when Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) came into conflict with Edward I of England (1272–1307) and Philip IV the Fair of France (1285–1314) because of their seeking to extract money from clerics to support their wars. Peace was initially restored between Boniface and Philip, the pope actually canonizing Louis XI, Philip's grandfather (1297).

Four years later, the conflict between pope and king renewed when Philip imprisoned a French bishop on accusations of treason. In April 1302, the Estates-General of France—consisting of representatives from the clergy, nobility, and the "Third Estate" (the people)—met and sided with their monarch against the pope. This stance left French bishops in a peculiarly awkward and vulnerable position.

In November, Boniface issued the papal bull Unam Sanctam, which reiterated very strong but certainly not new claims for the papacy's power over temporal rule at a time when the papacy's actual political influence was dramatically diminishing.

Philip spurned the pope's arguments and directives. He called for a council to depose Boniface for allegedly engaging in heresy, sodomy, and simony among other grievous charges.

The embattled pope replied by crafting the bull Super Petri solio, in which he excommunicated the king. However, on September 7, 1303, one day before this bull was scheduled to be published, Philip's supporters broke into the fortified papal summer palace in Anagni, thirty-seven miles from Rome, and for three days they incarcerated and physically brutalized Boniface. Townspeople rescued the pope, but he died a month later, on October 11, 1303.

C. The Political Order in Europe

In 1300, three years before Boniface's death, it was still not clear for some Europeans—at least at a superficial societal level—that the papacy's power and the unity of "Christendom" were tottering on the brink of disaster. Certainly, Catholic Jerusalem had fallen in 1187 to Saladin (c. 1138–93), and the last major stronghold of the Crusaders in the East had yielded in 1298. Moreover, Boniface VIII was facing especially vexing problems with the rambunctious French king, Philip IV, and the powerful Colonna family. But the city of Rome itself was teeming with the crush of thousands of pilgrims, many of whom were very anxious to buy a jubilee plenary indulgence, garnished as it was with a full absolution from the penalties of sin.

With sizable amounts of new monies brimming in the coffers of the pope and the cardinals, with enthused pilgrims pushing their way through the streets, and with the papacy's victory over the empire as represented by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250) of the Hohenstaufen family some fifty years earlier, Rome once again appeared poised to serve as the political and spiritual center of Europe.

How might we explain this dramatic loss of papal prestige and power as represented by Boniface VIII's humiliation at Anagni in 1303? The contexts for his predicament were both long-term and short-term in the making. In March 1075, Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) had boldly claimed in Dictatus papae that popes had the right to depose emperors. By implication this meant that papal powers were superior to the temporal power of kings. Popes Innocent III (1161–1216) and Innocent IV (1243–54) had believed themselves fortified with this theory when they confronted recalcitrant rulers, namely, John of England (1199–1216) and Emperor Frederick II.

At the same time, throughout Europe churches and even monasteries often belonged to nobles, bishops, and kings who viewed them as their personal property to sell or to inherit or to do with whatever they wanted. These "property owners" quite naturally esteemed churches and monasteries and the clergies associated with them as legitimate sources of income. This helps explain why Edward I of England and Philip IV of France believed it legitimate to take monies from their clergies, whereas Boniface VIII, armed with Gregory VII's dictum and a belief that kings and clergy owed him obedience, found the kings' acts indefensible and threatened them with strong sanctions.

Moreover, after Emperor Frederick II's death in 1250, the power of the Hohenstaufen, his family, did diminish substantially in Italy, only to be replaced by that of the Angevin family at Naples (the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies), whose members were cadet relatives of French royalty. In time this political circumstance made it easier for French monarchs such as Philip IV to believe that they had the right to interfere in the affairs of Italy, including those of the pope. Ironically, the papacy had facilitated the rise to power of the Angevin family to offset Hohenstaufen influence in Italy, a papal gambit that paid unforeseen and unwanted dividends.

Boniface VIII's immediate predecessor had complicated matters still further for the prideful pope. The elderly Celestine V (July–December 1294), who had been a spiritually minded recluse before his election, proved incapable of running the papacy and resigned the office, leaving its administration in shambles. Attempting to restore some kind of order, Boniface VIII felt obliged to take strong measures, which alienated disenfranchised cardinals from the Colonna family at Rome. Moreover, local clergies discontented by perceived encroachments of Rome in their own affairs and by the pope's own deeds and demands for money were on occasion willing to side with their monarchs rather than with the pope.

For diverse reasons, then, certain lay and clerical factions were quite prepared to join forces with Philip IV or other monarchs and princes to oppose Boniface VIII.

Nonetheless, the atrocities leading to Boniface's death in 1303 did provoke a sense of outrage even for several of the pope's strongest critics in life, including Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). This masterful poet, who blamed the pope for many of his own misfortunes, was aghast at Boniface's fate.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Church History, Volume Two: From Pre-Reformation to the Present Day by John D. Woodbridge, Frank A. James III. Copyright © 2013 John D. Woodbridge and Frank A. James III. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
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