All periods of human history are marked by achievements and failures, and this was no less true of the thirteenth century. Although the twelfth and thirteenth centuries registered many of the greatest achievements of medieval Western Christianity, there were areas where its goals were not achieved. Eight areas may be mentioned in which there were serious deficiencies in the medieval synthesis.
I. LATE MEDIEVAL DISSENT: THE PROBLEM OF DIVISION#
Reforms within the church had in a measure failed
The Cluniac reform had imposed celibacy, and the result was widespread concubinage.
Cluny had sponsored the Truce of God and the Peace of God, but then came a holy war and disillusionment whether God had willed it.
The papal reform gave the church’s direction to civil affairs, and the outcome was crusades to drive the Normans out of Sicily and against the Greek church.
Many thought that the time had come for reform from outside the church. The church came to apply the reproach of “heresy” not only to those doctrinally deviant, but also to those who did not conform or submit to the hierarchical church.
The Waldenses began as an effort at reform from within, became schismatic, and were finally counted as heretical.
The Cathari or Albigensians continued (or revived) the ancient heresy of dualism.
The church responded by turning the crusade against internal heretics and developing the Inquisition in order to identify and root out heretics. These major movements had their predecessors and contemporaries, some of which found a place within the church and some did not.
None of the eleventh- and early-twelfth-century heresies included someone of strong intellectual ability and academic training, and this fact no doubt limited their chances of survival.
A. Samples of Earlier Heretical Teachers#
Individual heretical teachers arose from time to time in the Middle Ages. Most of these are inadequately known from the reports of enemies and did not gain many followers.
An example is Henry the Monk in the early twelfth century. He started as a preacher of repentance and became a reformer of marriage, insisting that it was not a sacrament and that consent of the partners alone made a marriage. Under pressure from opposition and as a result of a fervent acceptance of the New Testament, Henry rejected the clergy, their sacraments, and the externals of religion. He denied the sacrifice of the mass, confession to priests, prayers for the dead, original sin (hence also infant baptism, which was to be replaced by baptism on personal responsibility), and the need for church buildings.
Peter de Bruys (of Bruis—d. c. 1140), active especially in southern France, was expelled from the priesthood. He too objected to the excessive materialization of religion: church buildings, the Mass as a sacrifice, prayers for the dead, veneration of crucifixes, the authority of the church, the Old Testament, the church fathers and traditions of the church, and infant baptism. He died when opponents threw him into a fire his supporters had built to burn crucifixes.
Different from these in his political involvements was Arnold of Brescia (d. 1155). He studied under Abelard and shared the latter’s condemnation at Sens in 1140. Coming to Rome, he became incensed at the temporal involvements of the papacy and took a leading part in trying to set up a democratic republic. He advocated poverty for the church and denied the validity of sacraments administered by unworthy priests.
Arnold’s rejection of the Donation of Constantine and belief that the emperor should receive his crown from the citizens of Rome, and not the pope, brought him for a time into the favor of the imperial party in the city. His program of reducing the church to purely spiritual matters ultimately did not fit the plans of either emperors or popes. Pope Eugene III excommunicated Arnold in 1148. A treaty between Frederick Barbarossa and Pope Eugene III in 1153 led to his arrest, his eventual hanging, and the suppression of his republic in 1155.
B. Poverty and Penitential Movements#
The Gregorian reform had emphasized the importance of worthy priests to carry out religious functions. Recognizing that worthiness and office often did not coincide, some began to regard the instructions of the Gospels and apostles as more important than ecclesiastical office in authorizing a person to preach and minister.
A new spirituality, based not on contemplative withdrawal as in traditional monasticism, but instead based on conformity to the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ, arose. The emphasis in this new spirituality was on the humanity of Jesus rather than on the divine King of heaven. The two concepts of voluntary Christian poverty and itinerant evangelical preaching came to be regarded as the essence of Christianity.
The leaders of these “apostolic life” (vita apostolica) movements — Humiliati, Waldensians, Beguines — as well as of the Mendicants, did not come from the lower economic orders but represented a religious response to new social, economic, and cultural conditions.
The Humiliati emerged in Lombardy, northern Italy, in the late twelfth century. They aimed at a purer moral life and wore clothing of undyed wool to express their humility. They were included in condemnations of all unlicensed preaching at the Third Lateran Council under Pope Alexander III (1179) and more comprehensively at the Council of Verona under Pope Lucius III (1184).
The condemnations at Verona concerned not heretical dogmas but secret meetings, opposition to taking oaths, and preaching without permission. Three types of Humiliati are recognizable:
Those who followed a religious life while living in their own homes
Celibate laity (men and women) living in community
Clerics (canons and canonesses) living in double monasteries
In 1201 the papacy of Innocent III approved a rule for the Humiliati that included permission for preaching on moral and penitential subjects in their communities, but not on articles of faith, thus making a distinction between private exhortation and public preaching.
Indicative of the religious spirit of the times was the Order of Penitents, who borrowed from the Humiliati and Beguines. Their manner of life, which appeared in the late twelfth century, is described in a document of about 1215:
Wore a robe made out of poor and undyed fabric
Fasted more frequently than others
Recited the seven canonical prayers daily
Made confession and took communion three times a year
Refused the shedding of blood and taking of oaths
The penitential spirit found its most extreme expression in the Flagellants. They emerged in the later thirteenth century under the influence of the eschatological excitement associated with the teachings of Joachim of Fiore, but became better known in the fourteenth century. Taking public a form of private penitence sometimes practiced in the monasteries, the Flagellants beat themselves until the blood flowed in the belief that physical suffering was redemptive.
The “Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit” apparently drew on the philosophical teachings of John Scotus Eriugena and the mysticism of Beguines and Beghards. Their monistic pantheism led to the conclusion of a direct identification with God that released them from the moral law. Charges of sexual immorality inevitably followed these premises.
They likely did not form an organized sect, and the little that is known of them comes from opponents. Indeed, there are grounds for the suspicion that such a movement did not really exist, but was invented by heresy hunters to characterize certain individual mystics.
Women took a prominent place in promoting a life of voluntary poverty and penitential asceticism centering on the sufferings of Christ, and some of these were condemned for heresy.
C. Waldenses#
Peter Waldo (better Valdes) was a rich merchant in Lyons. About 1173 he provided an income for his wife and separated from her, placed his daughters in a convent, and distributed his property among the poor in order to begin an itinerant life of preaching.
His movement came to emphasize three principal points:
A life of voluntary poverty
Access to the Bible in the vernacular
Public preaching
He and his followers sought recognition at the Third Lateran Council (1179). Their way of life was approved, but they were forbidden to preach except by invitation of the clergy.
Valdes and his “Poor Men of Lyons” disregarded this restriction and preached against the worldliness of the clergy. Hence, a council at Verona in 1184 included them with the Cathari in an excommunication. Some returned to the church as the “Catholic Poor,” pursuing the same activities as before. Others, although doctrinally orthodox and even (especially in France) attending Mass and keeping a formal connection with the Roman Catholic church, organized themselves apart from the church and appointed their own ministers.
Waldenses in Lombardy came to the Donatist position of doubting the validity of sacraments administered by unworthy priests and so took a position of greater separation from the Catholic church than did the French branch of the movement. A split between them occurred in 1205, and a conference at Bergamo in 1218 failed to heal it. Valdes died in the early thirteenth century, but his movement grew.
The Waldenses had the Gospels translated into the vernacular. Rejecting only the practices they saw as clearly against Scripture, they opposed especially prayers for the dead, purgatory, images, and veneration of saints and relics. Their concern to live by the Sermon on the Mount led them to refuse oaths and any form of killing. Catholic sources attributed to them asceticism, millennialism, and spirit-possession, but such may have been less generally held.
The Waldenses survived sometimes severe persecution in less accessible Alpine valleys and in 1532 began an accommodation with the Genevan reformers. They are the only Medieval sect to have a documented continuity to the present.
D. Cathari or Albigensians#
The Cathari, or Cathars (“the pure ones”), were known in France as Albigensians or Albigenses from the town of Albi in Languedoc, a center of their strength. They continued the dualism that reached back to the Manichaeans (the Cathari were regularly called “Manichees”) and was transmitted to Europe by the Bogomils (named for a Bulgarian priest), active in the Balkans from the eighth century.
Traces of dualist teaching appeared again in the Balkans and Turkey in the eleventh century, and it found a receptive hearing from some devoted to a rigorist morality in France and northern Italy by the twelfth century. The organized sect of the Cathari became particularly vigorous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with some original documents surviving from the thirteenth century. Catharism was the strongest heresy faced by the Catholic church in the thirteenth century, but it disappeared in the fourteenth.
The charge of dualism was correct in regard to the basic position of the Cathari. According to their dualism of spirit and matter, the Cathari condemned the flesh and material creation as evil. This entailed a rejection of marriage and procreation, of animal products for food, and of anything material in worship.
The perfecti (“perfect” members) lived up to the rigid asceticism and from them the clergy were drawn. The one sacrament of the group, which made a person one of the perfect, was the consolamentum, a baptism of the Holy Spirit conferred by the laying on of hands. The credentes (“believers”) lived ordinary lives but could receive the consolamentum as they approached death.
The austerity of the lives of the Cathari contrasted with the laxity of the Catholic clergy and commended them to the people. Their rejection of doctrines like hell and purgatory and practices like infant baptism led to the confusion of other protest movements with them and the application of the term Cathari to all regarded by the Catholic church as heretics.
Catharism failed before Catholicism because it could not give an adequate explanation of the whole of Scripture, and its assurance of salvation was to an exclusive few.
Other factors in the triumph of Catholicism included:
The attractiveness of a human Jesus Christ and of a positive view of creation and nature
Increased education
The effectiveness of the friars as preachers and confessors
The higher level of orthodox piety
The development of the third orders and lay confraternities as outlets for lay piety
Principally, however, the challenge of Catharism was put down by coercion—the force of arms and threat of punishment.
E. Crusade and Inquisition#
Innocent III’s first efforts at converting the heretics by preaching and debates met with little success. He then approved a crusade against the Albigenses that lasted from 1209 to 1229. The crusade, led first by Simon de Montfort and then King Louis VIII of France, soon turned political.
The counts of Toulouse (Raymond VI and then VII) were targeted
The struggle resulted in the incorporation of Languedoc into the kingdom of France
The crusade crushed the heresy but also devastated southern France.
The Inquisition was an ecclesiastical institution to search out heretics and bring them to punishment. Punishment was based on the laws of Christian emperors in antiquity who sometimes punished heretics with death, since heresy was considered the equivalent of witchcraft. Innocent III issued a decretal in 1199 that for the first time equated heresy with the crime of treason under Roman law.
In the late twelfth century bishops were expected to make legal inquiry of heretics in their dioceses and hand these over to the secular authorities for punishment.
The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) confirmed these regulations and threatened excommunication of temporal rulers who failed to rid their territory of heresy.
The Council of Toulouse in 1229 at the close of the Albigensian War drew up the procedures to be followed in seeking out and punishing heresy. The inquisitorial procedure replaced the accusatorial in seeking out heretics. The essence of the inquisitio procedure was that instead of an accuser bringing a public accusation, the judge himself made an inquiry by presenting the charges against a defendant. The action was intended to be started by public opinion.
Pope Gregory IX in 1231 approved Emperor Frederick II’s introduction of the penalty of burning to death, on the basis that heresy was equivalent to treason. In 1233 he appointed papal inquisitors, primarily Dominicans, to work in southern France. The papal inquisition made the episcopal inquisition of secondary significance. Inquisitorial handbooks were written to guide inquisitors in their questioning of suspects.
Pope Innocent IV in 1252 gave approval to use of the rack in the examination as a way of securing confessions.
It was now accepted as official policy that force had precedence over preaching and peaceful persuasion in dealing with heresy.
The defects in the Inquisition are obvious from a modern legal standpoint.
The charges and the names of accusers and witnesses were kept secret.
Wide powers of arrest and imprisonment were granted.
No witnesses were called for the defense, nor was there counsel for the defense.
Torture was used.
The death penalty was brutally applied.
The popular religious movements of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and the rise of a vernacular religious literature (below) provide the context in which the regional Council of Toulouse in 1229 banned all use of biblical texts by the laity, even in Latin.
F. Philosophical Error#
The concern about heresy also posed a problem in intellectual circles. In 1277 the bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, issued a condemnation of 219 philosophical and theological propositions that he associated with some masters in the faculty of arts at the university.
The preface to the condemned propositions accused certain teachers with holding to a theory of “double truth,” by which some ideas were said to be “true according to philosophy, but not according to the Catholic faith.” The position and its description is probably a conclusion drawn by the bishop and other opponents of the censured faculty members rather than something explicitly held by anyone.
Sixty-eight of the 219 propositions cannot be found in any contemporary author. The problem was that certain teachers opted to expound Aristotle by his own internal logic rather than to seek an integration of his views with the Christian faith. It is common to argue with the implications one sees in a rejected viewpoint rather than with what its defenders actually say.
II. WOMEN’S SPIRITUALITY: THE PROBLEM OF COMPREHENSIVENESS#
The percentage of women canonized or considered for canonization as saints increased significantly in the thirteenth to fifteen centuries, but most of the lay women who achieved sainthood came from royalty or the aristocracy.
The new religious orders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries developed female branches:
The Cisterican and Carthusian nuns
Premonstratensian canonesses
The second orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans.
Large numbers of these female houses came into existence. The male religious orders initially resisted assuming their oversight on the grounds that this responsibility took them away from their primary calling, but with the help of the papal curia these female houses were incorporated into the Mendicant orders.
The religious experiences of many women, both those inside and those outside the church, shared certain features: asceticism, paranormal phenomena, and visionary experiences. These features gave to women, however much some were dependent on male associates for guidance, a religious authority normally denied to them in medieval culture.
The institutional church, however, had difficulty coming to terms with these experiences and with finding ways to incorporate women’s spirituality into its corporate life. For all the comprehensiveness of Scholastic theology and mysticism, there were limits that some mystics, especially women, transgressed.
In the thirteenth century there became evident a third form of medieval theology: in addition to monastic theology (as represented, for instance, by Bernard of Clairvaux) and Scholastic theology (as in Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus), there emerged a vernacular theology. All would have agreed that the goal of theology is the love of God, but in the vernacular theology the relationship shifts away from the intellect to experience. This would climax in fourteenth-century mysticism.
Of special importance for vernacular theology were accounts of visions, and the distinctive contribution of vernacular theology was in the area of mysticism. In the thirteenth century, and first among the women vernacular theologians, the mystical union was described as a “union without difference,” in which there is an annihilation of the will so that one can “live without a why.” This formulation was quite problematic for orthodox theologians.
Vernacular theological literature—in the form of tracts, poetry, reports of experiences, and letters—had among its first representatives women spiritual writers. Among the new religious movements, and especially among women in the Dominican order that placed such a stress on theological training, there arose persons who wanted to read and write religious works, but who did not know Latin.
One of the learned women visionaries was Gertrude the Great (1256–1301/2) of the convent at Helfta. Never formally canonized, she was popularly regarded as a saint.
Gertrude composed prayers (Spiritual Exercises) to guide the devotions of her sister nuns.
She also recorded her visions of Jesus Christ and Mary, collected after her death in the Herald of Divine Love.
She often had visions of the heart of Christ, making her an early advocate of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Of special interest at a time when devotion to Mary was so strong is Gertrude’s concern that veneration was being given to Mary that properly belonged to Jesus Christ, who, possessing maternal as well as masculine characteristics, left no need for a feminine expression of deity.
However, Gertrude viewed Mary, the Virgin Mother, as seated beside Christ, and she even asked Christ to intercede for her with Mary, whom she felt was displeased with her for directing devotion to Christ alone.
THE JEWS: A PROBLEM OF TOLERATION#
Jews in western Europe had been subject to various restrictions since the conversion of the empire, especially in regard to proselytizing by them, but their situation greatly worsened in the eleventh century, and negative attitudes toward Jews were intensified by sentiments associated with the crusading movement.
The atmosphere was shown by extensive violence against Jews in western Europe already in 1010, apparently related to rumors that Jews had conspired with the caliph Al-Hakim, who destroyed the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in 1009. The Crusades themselves marked a turn from co-existence to active animosity in attitudes of Christians toward Jews, with the result that pogroms against the Jews occurred in several places in connection with the Crusades.
Various official actions were taken against the Jews. The French king Philip II Augustus expelled Jews from his royal domains in 1182, but in 1198 allowed them to return. They were expelled from France again by Philip IV in 1306.
The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) under Pope Innocent III required:
Jews and Muslims to wear distinctive clothing
Forbade Jews to be seen in public on Christian fast days
Forbade to charge excessive interest on loans (but allowed them to continue as moneylenders, a practice forbidden to Christians)
Renewed prohibitions on their holding public office, blaspheming Christ, and making converts
Pope Innocent IV in 1244 wrote to the king of France in support of the doctors of theology in Paris, who ordered the burning of the Hebrew Talmud.
Nevertheless, not all attitudes were negative. An interest in Jewish exegesis of the Bible was shown in various periods—by Alcuin, Stephen Harding, the Victorines, and Nicholas Lyra. The popes fairly consistently resisted severe persecution of the Jews.
IV. THE COUNCIL OF LYONS (1274): THE PROBLEM OF RELATIONS WITH THE EAST#
A. Leading Figures of the Time#
In the background of subsequent events was the figure of King Louis IX of France (1226–70), the embodiment of the highest ideas of medieval kingship and the last crusading king. Louis IX captured the Egyptian port of Damietta in 1249, but lost it the following year and had to pay ransom for the release of himself and his men. Proceeding to Syria, he strengthened the fortifications still in Christian hands before returning to France.
Pious in his personal life, Louis IX worked for justice in the administration of France. He is responsible for one of the great triumphs of medieval art and architecture, the royal chapel of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Having embarked on a further crusade, Louis IX died in Tunis.
Louis IX’s brother, Charles of Anjou (1226–85), who may be considered the first modern “imperialist,” attempted to use the crusading impulse for his own political ends. An ambitious and sometimes cruel but able ruler, he came to govern Anjou, Provence, and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.
As a direct vassal of the pope and overlord of Albania, Charles of Anjou converted the idea of empire into imperialism. It had no embodiment from 1250 to 1273, for there was no emperor in Germany. The papacy initially favored Charles as a counter to the German empire and maintained support for him against opponents to his rule in Sicily at the end of his career.
The Byzantine idea of empire involved a definite boundary in succession to the old Roman Empire. In the West the empire was as much a theory, indeed a theological-legal concept, as it was a geographical entity.
Charles of Anjou had a claim to the Latin kingdom in the East, and to forestall his ambitions, the eastern emperor Michael Palaeologus favored a general council and reunion of the Greek church with the papacy. Michael had retaken Constantinople for the Greeks in 1261 and founded the dynasty of the Palaeologi that ruled over the now small Byzantine empire until 1453. He entered into negotiations with the West as early as 1263.
Michael stressed spiritual motives for union:
He was willing to accept the filioque clause, but asked that the Greeks not have to alter the creed so as not to destroy the rhythm when it was sung.
He was also willing to accept the supremacy of the pope by having his name first in the liturgy and by recognizing his appellate jurisdiction.
Michael hoped that by winning the support of the papacy, he could hold back Charles of Anjou.
Pope Gregory X (1271–76) had accompanied Prince Edward of England (soon to become King Edward I) on crusade in connection with Louis IX’s Seventh Crusade after the sultan of Egypt had taken much of Palestine. He was elected pope while he was in Palestine after a three-year vacancy in the papal office. Gregory X was interested in church reform (problems were concubinage and the holding of multiple church offices with the consequent absenteeism), in the deliverance of Jerusalem, in union with the Greeks, and in settlement of the question of the German emperor.
These concerns came together in the Second Council of Lyons, 1274.
B. Proceedings at the Council#
The council that met in 1274 at Lyons, a free city of the western empire, is counted by the West as the Fourteenth Ecumenical Council (the second at Lyons). The prime movers in the gathering of the council were:
Pope Gregory X (acting against the interests of his vassal Charles of Anjou)
Michael Palaeologus (acting against the deepest instincts of his people)
Thomas Aquinas wrote Against the Errors of the Greeks to be used as a basis of theological discussion at the council. On Thomas’s death, Bonaventure took his place at the council and was made a cardinal by Gregory X.
Among the noteworthy events associated with the council was the papal approval of Rudolf of Hapsburg over Alfonso of Castile as German emperor. Rudolf founded the Hapsburg dynasty that ruled until 1918 (in Austria), succeeding the Hohenstaufen dynasty of German emperors that ruled from 1138 to 1254.
The high point of the council was the reunion with the Greek church, already agreed to in principle, celebrated by the singing of the creed in Greek and in Latin. Significant for the future was that Avignon was ceded to the papacy.
Among the decrees of the council was the requirement that a pope be elected by the cardinals locked in one room and put on dwindling rations after three days and deprived of their revenues until a decision was reached. These stern conditions were to prevent another three-year vacancy in the papacy.
C. Aftermath of the Council#
Plans for a crusade occupied much attention at the council, but it never materialized, the idea dying with Gregory X. With the fall of Acre in 1291 to the Mameluke Turks, who ruled in Egypt, the last Christian holding in the Holy Land was back in the possession of the Muslims.
People in western Europe continued to talk about crusades to the Holy Land for over two hundred more years, but nothing came of the talk. The union of the Latin and Greek churches did not last. Indeed it died before Michael Palaeologus did, for he was excommunicated by the pope in 1281. The “Sicilian Vespers,” a revolt in 1282 against Charles of Anjou’s rule in Sicily, ended his political ambitions.
The council that seemed to promise so much in reforming and reuniting the church and reinvigorating the Crusades failed to realize these goals and ultimately had little effect on the course of events.
V. CHRISTIANITY ON THE FRONTIERS: PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS#
Syriac Christianity declined in the tenth to twelfth centuries.
Education increased among the Muslims so that they were less dependent on their educated Christian subjects
Under the influence of non-Arab elements in the government Muslim rulers became less tolerant.
The use of Syriac, except in the liturgy, declined among the east Syrians (Church of the East) in the tenth century and virtually ceased in the thirteenth. A revival of Syriac Christian literature occurred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries among the west Syrian Jacobites.
Illustrious names of authors who preserved much of previous history and learning included
Dionysius bar Salibi (d. 1171), who wrote a massive commentary on the entire Bible
Michael the Syrian (1126– 99), whose Chronicle recorded world history to 1195
Bar Hebraeus (1226–86), greatest of all with a synthesis of Jacobite theology, notes on the Bible, histories, and a summary of canon law
Thereafter Syriac waned before Arabic until it became mainly a liturgical language.
Meanwhile, during the thirteenth century the Church of the East experienced another period of geographical expansion into central Asia, positioning itself for political influence at a crucial period for Asian and world history.
During the thirteenth century another wave of invaders (after the Turks) from central Asia made their presence felt—the Mongols (or Tar-tars) led by Genghis Khan (1167–1227) and his successors. Their sweep west reached Poland and Hungary temporarily (1241), but Russia fell under control of the Mongols until the fifteenth century. Only the region around Novgorod maintained a semblance of independence and became a center of renewal in the Russian church.
Alexander Nevsky became a Russian national hero by defeating Swedish and other western invaders and negotiating lower tribute payments to the Mongols. The Mongol rule meant Russia developed in isolation from the West and was responsible for moving the center of Russian government and civilization from Kiev north to Moscow. The Orthodox church gave a sense of national unity to the Russian people during this time of foreign rule, as it did later to the Greeks under Turkish rule.
Marco Polo’s account of his travels to the East (late thirteenth century) makes frequent reference to encountering Jacobite and Nestorian Christians along the way. They had already made the Turkic and Mongol rulers familiar with the Christian faith. Nestorian merchants had begun the conversion of the Keraits, a Turko-Mongol tribe, in the eleventh century. After overrunning them, Genghis Khan took the Christian princess Sorkaktani as the wife for one of his sons.
Sorkaktani became the mother of three emperors: Mongke, Great Khan of Mongolia; Hülegü, Ilkhan of Persia; and Kublai Khan, emperor of China. Hülegü married a daughter of the East Roman emperor, favored the Dyophysite (“Nestorian”) Christians, and sought an alliance with the West, sending representatives to the Council of Lyons in 1274. His successors, however, brought Persia back into the Muslim fold by the end of the century.
Kublai Khan, a shamanist who favored Buddhism (contrary to Marco Polo’s wishful thinking) but tolerant of all religions, moved his capital to the city now known as Beijing. When Nicolo and Maffeo Polo (father and uncle of Marco Polo) returned from Kublai’s capital in 1269, they carried a message from him asking the pope to send a hundred teachers of the Christian religion.
In response to Kublai’s request, Pope Gregory X sent two Dominicans, who turned back when they met warfare in Armenia. A Franciscan, John of Montecorvino in Italy, arrived in China in 1294, the year of Kublai Khan’s death, and later a few other Franciscans followed him; but they were too little too late, and besides they failed to reach the native Chinese.
The death of Kublai Khan in 1294 and the conversion of the Ilkhan Ghazan of Persia to Islam in 1295 signaled the beginning of the collapse of the Church of the East after the great promise of the thirteenth century. By the mid-fourteenth century all the Mongol khanates had converted to Islam.
Tamerlane (1336–1405), another descendant of Ghengis Khan, led a new wave of invasions by the Mongol Turks that overran central and western Asia. Although a Muslim, he spared neither Muslims nor Christians. His conquests virtually obliterated the missions of the east Syrians and began the long decline of the Church of the East.
Military suppression alone did not explain the ultimate disappearance of this church from central Asia. The use of Syriac in the liturgy gave a sense of being a foreign religion. Education declined. Evangelistic fervor was lost. The members and their leaders accommodated to their rulers’ standards of worldly success.
Ethiopia in the thirteenth century emerged from a period of some six centuries for which there exists virtually no Ethiopian documentation. During that time a synthesis formed of the early Axumite and biblical traditions with the native African traditions. The establishment (or restoration in Ethiopian terms) of the Solomonic dynasty in 1270 coincided with the beginning of a golden age of Ethiopian literature and art, brought to an end by a destructive Turkish invasion in the sixteenth century.
Church and state in Ethiopia were closely intertwined, for the monarch (a presumed descendant of Solomon and so related to Jesus Christ) provided the church with large grants of land and other resources and was himself virtually the head of the church in many of its affairs.
An important western proponent of missions to Muslims and Jews was Raymond Lull (Ramon Llull—c. 1233–c. 1315). Born in Majorca off the coast of Spain not long after it was freed from Muslim rule, he became a mystic and a poet in Latin and his native Catalan.
Having studied Arabic and joined the Third Order of Franciscans, Raymond advocated converting Muslims by preaching and martyrdom rather than by force of arms. He promoted the study of eastern languages in universities and the use of rational arguments to convert non-Christians. Missionaries should learn the languages of unbelievers and should also bring some of them to the West to learn Latin.
His mission trips to North Africa and elsewhere were unsuccessful, but his efforts did encourage the study of Arabic and other eastern languages by Western Christians.
VI. WORSHIP AND PASTORAL CARE: A PROBLEM IN THE RELIGIOUS LIFE#
The traditional methods of the church were ineffectively utilized to communicate the Christian gospel and Scriptures and to include the people in worship.
The success of the Mendicants was in part a response to the failures of the secular clergy. The liturgy continued in Latin, which by the high Middle Ages was less and less understood by the ordinary people as the vernacular languages of Europe were developing into their modern European counterparts. Hence the religious expressions of the people were primarily ritual acts and gestures.
One can tell much about concerns of an age by its hortatory literature:
In the third century, exhortations to martyrdom
In the fourth century, exhortations to baptism for those delaying its reception
In the thirteenth century most of the sermons that survive, many delivered during Lent, are exhortations to make confession
Little preaching in fact had come to be done in church, so the Mendicant orders’ preaching activity was a refreshing revival of preaching.
The merit of St. Yves (1253–1303) in Brittany, the only parish priest to be canonized in the Middle Ages, was his foregoing the opportunity for ecclesiastical advancement in order to care for the souls of the peasants of Brittany.
Other efforts were made both inside and outside the liturgy to teach Christian lessons to the people. There are examples of dramatized liturgy, a forerunner of liturgical drama, as early as the tenth century. Christian drama began in a liturgical context with the elaboration of the Easter and Christmas stories. Manuscripts of developed musical liturgical dramas exist from the thirteenth century.
The main use of drama occurred in a non-liturgical context. Miracle plays became especially popular in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Two main types of dramatization were
Miracles performed by Mary in response to prayers
Episodes from the life of a saint involving a miracle
Morality plays involving allegorical depictions of personified virtues and vices belong to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The term “mystery plays” (for reenactments of biblical history or lives of the saints) was in use in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The earliest complete Passion play comes from the end of the thirteenth century.
VII. ESCHATOLOGY AND FANATICISM: A PROBLEM OF HOPE#
Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202), abbot of a Cistercian monastery in Calabria (southern Italy), found his Trinitarian views condemned at the Fourth Lateran council, but he submitted to the papacy. Of more consequence was his Trinitarian periodization of history, which fueled eschatological expectations.
The first age, the age of the Father, was the period of marriage under the Law of Moses
The second age, the age of the Son, was the period of the clergy under grace that was to last 1,260 years
The third age, the age of the Spirit, will be the age of the monks, who having the mind of the Spirit would live in liberty without the mediation of the church
Joachim himself was not so much concerned with chronology as his later followers were. He described the three periods by a word, status, that did not have temporal connotations, but rather meant “condition” or “constitutional order.” Hence, there was an overlapping in time of the three divine arrangements.
Joachim’s three conditions or circumstances of God’s regimen for human society reflected three central concerns:
The interpretation of Scripture
The mystery of the Trinity
The meaning of history
The last age would see the rise of new religious orders that would convert the world and usher in the church of the Spirit.
Such a scheme could be seen as a note of:
Optimism—a perfect age was dawning
Pessimism about the existing institutional church
The latter was the interpretation given his thought by the spiritual Franciscans, who saw themselves as such a new order and Francis as the herald of the new age. One of these rigorist Franciscans, Peter John Olivi (c. 1248–98), used these ideas in his commentary on Revelation, condemned in 1326 by Pope John XXII.
Olivi is significant for another reason, for he advocated the doctrine of papal infallibility. Pope Nicholas III in 1279 decreed the observance of the rule of evangelical poverty for the Franciscan order, allowing the use but not ownership of property. Olivi did not want this ruling reversed, although he himself went further in arguing that the use should be that by a pauper. He personalized and gave a polemical edge to the claim of inerrancy for the pope.
There was a tradition of affirming inerrancy in regard to faith and morals for the universal church and in particular the Roman church. The canon lawyers of the twelfth century who championed the sovereignty of the pope, however, had not drawn the conclusion of personal infallibility, because, if the decrees of previous popes were not reformable, this would limit the absolute authority and freedom of the present pope.
For some time the doctrine of papal inerrancy was promoted only by the radical Franciscans and the papacy took no interest in it (Pope John XXII even condemned it as a “pernicious novelty”). Guido Terreni integrated the idea into medieval ecclesiology: The universal church required a supreme teaching authority (the papacy), and such teaching authority required the counsel and consent of the universal church.
The leader of the Spiritual Franciscans after Olivi’s death, Ubertino da Casale, branded Pope Boniface VIII as the beast of Revelation, the “mystical Antichrist.” The identification of the pope with the Antichrist has its origin in the thirteenth century. On the other hand, there were expectations of an “Angelic Pope” who would come to restore the church to its pristine condition before the end of time.
In circles influenced by Joachim, Olivi, and the Spiritual Franciscans, as well as by the Waldensians, there emerged during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries the idea that the church had fallen into corruption and that there was a need to restore apostolic faith and practice. Such a conviction was to become a significant ingredient in the reformatory movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
VIII. BONIFACE VIII (1294-1303): THE PROBLEM OF THE NATIONAL MONARCHIES#
The success of Innocent III’s successors was not so much due to the papacy winning acceptance for its theory of the empire as its ability to enlist the support of national monarchies outside the empire. These kingdoms, especially of France and England, used the conflict of the empire and the papacy to bring about a shift in the balance of power detrimental to both, especially in the second half of the thirteenth century.
The paradox of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century is that the papacy’s opposition to the “universal” empire led to the decline of the “universal” papacy. The principal political antagonists of the papacy became the new national monarchies. Those monarchies, having more internal cohesiveness and greater loyalty of their citizens, achieved a success in their struggles with the papacy that the empire seldom enjoyed.
A. Boniface’s Predecessor, Celestine V#
Celestine had been a Benedictine monk, but he retired into solitude. Many disciples of his ascetic life gathered around him, and he pled the cause of his mendicants before the Council of Lyons (1274). They became called Celestines from his papal name after his election as pope.
The Colonna and Orsini factions in the college of cardinals produced a stalemate in the papal election of 1294. In a pious move, Celestine was chosen as a compromise dark horse. He was about eighty, a spiritual man of no education and crude language. Celestine was hailed as the “Angel Pope,” and there were great hopes that he would lead a spiritual reform of the church, bringing on the new spiritual age expected by the Spiritual Franciscans.
Charles II of Anjou now ruled only at Naples, but inherited some of his father’s ambitions. He prevailed on Celestine to live at Naples and secured a controlling influence on the pope, who readily granted Charles’s nominations for administrative posts. Celestine rapidly lost supporters and resigned before the end of the year.
B. Boniface VIII (1294-1303): “Pride Goes before a Fall”#
Benedict of Gaetani had risen through service in the curia until he was elected pope. The very opposite of his predecessor, Boniface was strong-willed, shrewd, ambitious, an authority in canon law, but also not free of avarice and nepotism.
Boniface VIII proclaimed the year a Jubilee, providing a plenary (full) indulgence for those who confessed their sins and made a pilgrimage to a basilica in Rome in that year or any succeeding one hundredth year.
One of the pilgrims in that year was Dante Aligheri (1265–1321), a magistrate from Florence, who became indignant at the pope and at the bazaar in spiritual goods he observed. Dante saw the Jubilee traffic as the worst form of simony, now extended in meaning to include all sale of spiritual goods.
As a result of his visit to Rome, Dante became anti-papal, and the events of 1300 became the basis of his views expressed in two books.
The first book, On Monarchy, argued for a universal political rule to balance the papacy’s spiritual rule.
The second book, the Divine Comedy, is the most significant literary expression of the medieval Christian world view.
The theological basis of the Divine Comedy is mostly that of Thomas Aquinas, but Dante offers a poetic synthesis comparable to the scholastic and architectural syntheses of the thirteenth century.
It was Boniface’s political struggles, however, that held the immediate attention of his pontificate. National monarchs had now replaced the emperor as the principal antagonists of the church, and the national states succeeded where the empire had failed in asserting secular power over the church.
In England and France, the clergy were being taxed and often fleeced to support the wars of these monarchs. Boniface in 1296 issued the bull Clericis laicos, directed against Edward I of England (1272–1307) and Philip IV the Fair of France (1285–1314).
Boniface distinguished clergy and laity, but in the haste of the situation did not do so tactfully.
He forbade the clergy to pay taxes without papal assent.
Philip replied by forbidding all transport of valuables to Rome. The pope had to back down and even sought a reconciliation by canonizing Philip’s grandfather, Louis IX (and so we have St. Louis).
The contest between Boniface and Philip was renewed in 1301 when the papal legate was brought to trial. Boniface issued in 1302 the bull Unam sanctam, influenced by the political theology of Giles of Rome and James of Viterbo.
Much of the content of Unam sanctam is a synthesis of earlier teaching:
There is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church outside of which there is no salvation
There is one body and one Head, whose representative is the pope
There are two swords, one (spiritual) to be used by the church by the hand of the priest and the other (temporal) by the hand of the king under the direction of the priest for the church
No one may judge the pope, and the spiritual power has the right to guide the secular power and judge it when it does not act rightly
This relationship is ordained by God
Then at the end of Unam sanctam comes the famous conclusion:
Furthermore, we declare, state, and define that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.
John of Paris spoke to the conflict between the French king and the pope in On the Royal and the Papal Power, setting forth a political theology that would limit the papacy’s jurisdiction in temporal affairs.
The king took a more direct approach to limiting the pope’s actions. In alliance with the Colonna faction in Rome, he had Boniface kidnapped. The people of Anagni rescued the pope after three days, but he died in Rome a month later.
Boniface’s claims for the papacy placed him in the succession of Gregory VII and Innocent III, but his failure foreshadowed the diminishing political power of the papacy.
C. Aftermath#
Boniface’s second successor, Clement V, in 1305 transferred the papal residence to Avignon (1309), a principality ceded to the pope at the Council of Lyons but under French influence. Clement did not consider this move unusual, for other popes had lived elsewhere to avoid the political machinations at Rome, but the popes stayed in Avignon so long (until 1377) and were under such French influence that this nearly seventy-year period came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy.
IX. SUMMARY#
With its mixture of triumphs and failures the church history of the thirteenth century is no different from other centuries, distinguished only by being more spectacular in its successes and shortcomings.
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in historical hindsight are referred to as the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or pre-Reformation—or all of these. Whatever the preferred designation, the events of that period developed out of the thoughts and institutions that had preceded it. Strands from the early and medieval church encountered new impetuses in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that would lead to new alignments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The church was buffeted by winds of doctrine and sea changes of civilization: from early theological discussion of its fundamental beliefs to impressive summas of philosophical theology, from Semitic to Greco-Roman to Germanic and Slavic cultures.
The church developed from an insignificant group of disciples to a persecuted minority to a triumphant state church to an embattled institution to a world ruling power to an authority under challenge. Forces of vitality and renewal always had arisen among the followers of Jesus, and they would again in the trying times to follow.