Western Civ. Ii Decline of the Papacy The High Middle Ages Page 5 Page 9 THE CRUSADES In my last lecture, I talked about the growing power of the papacy in Western Europe down to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216. I suggested that one key to the success of the popes in gaining greater independence and power was the great religious prestige that they had. One factor that increased their prestige was that they took the lead in promoting and organizing religious wars called crusades. The crusades were one of the distinctive phenomena of the Middle Ages and one of the most important developments of the period after 1000. The idea of a crusade, a religious war, is hard for us in the modern world to understand, so I want to begin by considering where the idea came from. To understand the origins of the crusades, we need to know something abut the conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1000s. Since the 400s, the most powerful country in the region had been the Byzantine Empire. But it was threatened by a major enemy, the Moslems. Under the Arab leadership, Islam had captured large parts of the Empire in North Africa and the Middle East (600s and 700s). But the Empire was able to keep control over its most important lands in Greece and Asia Minor, despite frequent Arab attacks. But around 1050, a new enemy invaded Byzantine lands in Asia Minor. These new invaders were the Seljuk Turks. The Turks were a barbarian group that spread into Asia Minor from the area of modern Persia. Initially they had been pagans, but in the course of their migration they had converted to Islam. They were very warlike and incorporated their aggressive customs into their own brand of Islam. Because they spread into Asia Minor during a period of Byzantine disorganization, they were able to conquer all of Asia Minor, which now became Turkey, the land of the Turks. This land was rich in population and in resources, so its loss seriously weakened the Eastern Roman Empire. In 1081, a powerful new emperor named Alexius Comnenus (1081-1118) took the Byzantine throne. Under him, peace was restored internally, and the Empire began to recover. Alexius began to make plans in about 1090 to reconquer Asia Minor from the Turks. But to do that, he needed soldiers for his army. Remember that the East Romans often hired mercenaries, foreign soldiers, to fight for them. Alexius got the idea that he would try to hire some knights from Western Europe for this purpose. The only problem was how to persuade them to come and fight for him. P a g e 1 o f 12
One way was by appealing to religion. The Turks were Moslems, and the lands they had conquered were populated by Christians. Only a few years before in 1054, the Eastern and Western Churches had split apart. But they were still all Christians and had a common interest in blocking the spread of Islam. At the same time, I should mention that the Turks were some pretty nasty people. Around 1000, the Turks had taken control of Jerusalem from the Arabs. They imprisoned and tortured Christian pilgrims. Arabs had welcomed pilgrims, and especially the money they spent in Jerusalem. But the Turks were militant Moslems who didn t have the same tolerance of Christians. This helped fire up anti-islamic sentiment in the West. Anyway, at this time Alexius wrote and asked for Pope Urban s help in recruiting soldiers. He pointed out that the Turks were the enemy of all Christians, and he argued that if they were not stopped, they might overrun the whole Christian world. Urban liked this idea very much. In 1095, he attended a church council being held at Clermont in France. He made a passionate speech urging Christians to go to the East and fight to protect their religion from the Turks. Historians have suggested many different reasons to explain why Urban gave this speech. He may have thought that this was one way to improve relations with the Byzantine Empire. He also wanted to reduce warfare in Western Europe. With little central control over the many lords who wanted to expand their holdings, there were little wars all over Western Europe. Urban worked to stop that. One way to keep the knights from fighting each other was to give them someone else to fight the Turks. Urban s speech at Clermont was very successful. Word of it spread rapidly throughout the West, and knights everywhere began to swear that they were ready to go fight the Turkish infidels. But as the movement spread, it also began to change into something different from what either Urban II or Alexius Comnenus intended. Most Western knights were not primarily interested in fighting for the Turks in Asia Minor. They wanted to free the city of Jerusalem in the Holy Land. Thus, by popular demand, the war became an independent effort to free the Holy Land from the Moslems. It was the First Crusade. On November 27, 1095, Urban spoke about the problems in the East, as he declared bellum sacrum against the Muslims who had occupied the Holy Land and were attacking the Eastern Roman Empire. Crusading Impulses Now, you may wonder why so many knights were willing to undertake the long and dangerous journey to the Holy Land to fight. There were many reasons. Men in the Middle Ages were extremely religious and wanted to gain salvation, and this helped encourage crusading. As a reward for crusaders, Urban II and other popes offered them a special religious benefit called a plenary indulgence. When a person confessed his sins in Church, he was required to do a penance, a good deed or selfpunishment, to make up for his sins. It was widely thought that the penance would lessen the punishment that the person received from God for his sins. The plenary indulgence allowed sinful men to go on a crusade in the place of doing some other kind of thing as penance. But there were also some practical, economic benefits for crusaders. Most of them were the younger sons of lords in Western Europe. By the 1000s, it was established practice that the lands and fiefs of a lord would all be inherited by his oldest son. The younger sons would not inherit anything, and a man who had no lands and fiefs was nothing. Thus, younger sons desperately wanted to gain lands for themselves. One way to get land was to take it away from someone else, in this case the Moslems. P a g e 2 o f 12
Above and beyond anything else, the knights of the Middle Ages had two things that they were passionately interested in war and religion. A crusade had plenty of both. Thus, crusades were popular through most of the rest of the Middle Ages. A Few Crusades There were too many crusades for me to talk about all of them. I merely want to mention a few to illustrate what they were like. They varied. Some of the crusades were not really wars at all. They were simply unorganized movements of people going together to Jerusalem. One of these was the Peasants Crusade (1098-1099). It was set off by news of the Council of Clermont. Serfs from all over Europe left manors and went on a pilgrimage to fight the Turks. They arrived in Constantinople before the crusading army. Alexius Comnenus gave them boats to sail across to Turkey, where the Turks simply wiped them out or enslaved them. But most crusades were actually military expeditions. Most went to the Holy Land. The most successful was the First Crusade (1098-1099). Crusaders captured Jerusalem and the lands around it. But these lands were surrounded by Moslems, and the crusaders always had trouble holding on to them. Thus, other crusades were needed to support them later on. Not all crusades took place in the Holy Land. One important crusading area was Spain, where the Christian kings of the north fought throughout the rest of the Middle Ages to drive the Moslems out. Some Crusades were pretty weird. The Fourth Crusade (1204) started out for Jerusalem, but it crusaders ended up by capturing Constantinople and many other lands of the Empire in Greece. They created a new emperor of their own. The East Romans finally succeeded in recapturing Constantinople in 1261, but the crusaders held some parts of Greece until the end of the Middle Ages. Another bizarre crusade was the Childrens Crusade (1212). Under the leadership of a German teenager, Thousands of Children tried to get to the Holy Land. They were offered transport by Italian merchants who took them to North Africa and sold them into slavery. Success of the First Crusade Anyway, the First Crusade did succeed in capturing some territories in the Holy Land. The crusaders created a feudal government for the Holy Land. They divided the conquered lands up into four feudal states, and each one of these was given to one of the four principle leaders of the crusade. The states centered around four major captured cities Edessa, Antioch, Tripolis, Jerusalem. The leaders of the first three states took the title count, so their states became counties. But the leader of Jerusalem was called king. He was acknowledged as their main leader. Then each of these leaders divided his state up into fiefs and granted them to knights who had fought under him in the crusade. Then the king of Jerusalem, who was the principal leader of the whole region, was recognized as suzerain of the three counts who held the remaining major states. This is a perfect, almost textbook example of what a feudal government normally looked like. This government had to defend the region from constant Moslem efforts to recapture it. It was extremely difficult. For defense, the lords of the great feudal states relied mainly on their vassals at first, later reinforced by new knights who came on other crusades. P a g e 3 o f 12
Crusader rulers also turned to another source of fighting men developed in the Holy Land, the crusading orders, an invention that could only have appeared in the Middle Ages. These were orders of monks. Like other monks, they did not marry, had no property, and lived by a set of religious rules. But unlike other monks, their special job was to fight. They were knights. There were several of these orders. One famous order was the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem, usually called the Templars for short. Another was the Knights of the Hospital of Jerusalem, the Hospitalers. Even with their assistance, the crusader states had only a precarious existence. In the 1100s, a series of strong Moslem leaders were able to reunite the Moslem peoples, and they gradually re-conquered the Holy Land. By 1291, the last Christian territory in the Holy Land was lost. Results of the Crusades So, what were the results of the crusades. In a way, they affected almost every development in the rest of the course. On the surface, the crusades might seem to have had very little effect politically, but appearances can be deceiving. The crusades did not, of course, succeed in breaking the Moslem hold over the Holy Land or ending the Moslem threat in the East. In fact, they had the opposite result. The crusades, especially the Fourth, played a major role in weakening the Eastern Roman Empire. As I suggested earlier in the lecture, the Empire was the major defense against the Moslems in the East. With the Empire weakened, that defense became less effective. But the crusades made more lasting gains in other places, such as in Spain where the Christian territory grew by fits and starts. In addition, there were other important political results. The leadership which the popes provided for the crusading movement enhanced their prestige and power in Europe. Ironically, they also strengthened the principal rivals of the popes in Western Europe the kings of the major states. The knights who went on the crusades were supporters of feudalism and decentralized government at home. They opposed the kings. With these knights gone, European kings were able to gain more authority at home. More importantly, the crusades stimulated a close, continuous contact between Western Europe and the lands of the East again. That contact had declined since the fall of the Roman Empire and had almost disappeared after the death of Charlemagne. It was significant, because Moslems and Eastern Romans were much more advanced than men in Western Europe. Contact with these more advanced lands exposed Western Europeans to goods and luxury items that were not available in their own lands. Demand for such goods grew, and the crusader states provided a ready source for them. Thus, trade between East and West was renewed. With the growth of trade, very gradually, cities began to reemerge and to grow again in parts of Western Europe. In addition, much more of the learning and knowledge of ancient times had been preserved in the East than in the West. With the crusades, some of this learning began to find its way back to the West. Thus, after a long period of more or less steady decline in civilization since the end of the Roman Empire, Western Europe finally turned the corner and began to advance again. P a g e 4 o f 12
Decline of the Papacy In an earlier lecture, I talked about the growing influence of the popes in Western Europe down to the time of Innocent III (1198-1216). For the previous two hundred years, the popes had struggled to free the Church from political control and to bring it more fully under the control of Rome. They had been extremely successful. They succeeded because of the great religious prestige that they had in the eyes of Western Christians. Today, I will discuss how papal prestige and influence declined in the later Middle Ages. The decline was connected with great changes that began in Europe in the 1100s. Most of them resulted from the growth of cities. Cities created many new religious problems and concerns which, in turn, led to significant new spiritual movements. Cities produced great prosperity. Many individuals and institutions became much richer, and the Church was no exception. The growing wealth troubled many Christians who still believed that men should care more for their souls than for their material well-being. This increase in wealth also made the plight of the poor more obvious and raised new concern for their condition. Moreover, universities promoted the growth of new ideas and a greater willingness to question older beliefs. Some of the new ideas were disquieting some even smacked of heresy. These problems came at a time when there was a great outburst of religious enthusiasm and activism because of the crusades. People wanted to do something to solve the new problems. Traditionally, monks had taken the lead in dealing with religious problems. But older monastic orders were not suited to handle the new, primarily urban, problems. Monastic life was traditionally rural life, and these new problems were urban problems. To make matters worse, traditional orders were often rich themselves. The monks gave up personal property, but the orders owned vast lands on which the monasteries or convents were located. To many of the people who believed that the Church was becoming too material, this monastic wealth contradicted the monastic goals of poverty and the rejection of the material world. In the later 1100s, new religious orders appeared which had an urban base and tried to deal with urban problems. The members tried to imitate the vita apostolica, the simple life of Christ and the Apostles depicted in the New Testament. They gave up not only personal and even common and traveled from city to city, living on handouts. They were called mendicants. The most famous mendicant order was founded by an Italian nobleman named St. Francis of Assisi (d. 1226). The Franciscans helped the sick and poor and preached the simple faith of the Gospels in the cities. At first, they had no property at all and little organization. They merely followed a few simple rules written by St. Francis. P a g e 5 o f 12
A less typical mendicant order was founded by an austere Spaniard, St. Dominic (d.1221). He wanted his order, the Dominicans, to play a special role in combating heresy in the cities. For that reason, they were much more tightly organized than most mendicants, with many strict rules to follow. Dominicans had to study orthodox doctrine, and the order provided teaching centers for them. The Franciscan and Dominican orders intended to live by begging, hence their name, mendicant. Since they were not tied to monasteries or territorial parishes, they were free to take the gospel into the streets, to preach, hear confessions, and minister to people wherever they were. Essentially, both orders saw themselves as imitating Christ in their mission of preaching and their practice of poverty. The mendicant orders choice to pursue the vita apostolica (the apostolic life) made them very popular with the ordinary people who had come to see the Church as remote from their concerns and in need of reform. This desire for reform on the part of lay people led to other spiritual movements such as the Waldensians and Cathars, who were later deemed heretical. As time went by, however, both the Franciscans and Dominicans found their ideal of radical poverty difficult to carry out. Mendicants were a problem for the papacy because they were hard to control. They had little or no hierarchy, no monasteries or monastic leadership in short, they wandered. Believing that recognition and support would encourage obedience and loyalty to the Church, at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, Pope Innocent III officially recognized the Franciscans and the Dominicans as regular Church orders. But the Franciscans had to adopt a tighter organization, and all other mendicant orders were banned (some would be approved around the end of the 13th century. The mendicant life was so popular that the orders continued to spread anyway. As they spread, mendicants became increasingly more critical of the organized Church s wealth and increasing luxury. Secular Focus of the Papacy These changes played a major role in weakening papal prestige. Now, in earlier conflicts with political leaders, most popes had sought only to unify the Church and free it from political influence. But, beginning with Innocent III, popes were much more interested in gaining wealth and political power for themselves. Remember that Innocent III argued that God should rule the world through the pope that secular rulers should merely exist to carry out the pope s wishes. Innocent s ideas greatly influenced his successors. The popes of the later 1200s spent lots of energy trying to control political life and political events in Western Europe. They used the religious powers of interdiction and excommunication to bully rulers who opposed them. They even proclaimed crusades against some Christian opponents. Since wealth extended their power, popes began to find new ways to get more money through taxation and tithes. To many Christians this new focus on wealth seemed inconsistent with Christian values. Criticism of the pope s practices grew. The papacy began to regard criticism of any sort as heresy, and it took increasingly severe steps to suppress such criticism. In 1213, Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) created a new ecclesiastical court to investigate and prosecute heretics and dissenters. It was called the Court of the Inquisition. Innocent III confirms the Franciscans as an order of the Church in 1215. P a g e 6 o f 12
Traditionally, the only penalty that the Church imposed for heresy was excommunication, although political leaders often took more extreme action against dissenters on their own. But the new court was empowered to use extreme methods such as torture to discover heretics and to hand down (but not actually carry out) the death penalty for those convicted. The operation of the Court was turned over to the one group best suited to run it, the Dominican order. As mendicants, they went everywhere, and they had the training to spot heresy and to refute it wherever it was found. They became know as the Hounds of God. Boniface VIII vs. Philip the Fair At the end of the 1200s, the papacy seemed to have dealt with criticism successfully, but the cost to the prestige of the papacy had been high. As a result, the popes couldn t withstand a serious challenge to their political power from secular princes. The power of Western kings had been growing over the later Middle Ages, especially in France and England. The collapse of papal political power began with a dispute between Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) and the strongest king in Europe, Philip IV of France (1285-1314). They quarreled over two issues. The first was the right of Philip to tax the French clergy. Philip always needed more money, and the Church was very rich. In the past, the French Church had paid some feudal dues to the king that Church leaders owed to him as their suzerain. Additionally, the French clergy had been required by papal edicts to pay certain taxes to the French king to pay for Crusades in the mid-1200s. Philip IV decided, basically, to levy the taxes, but skip the Crusade part. And, in 1295, Philip demanded more money from the clergy of France. Some French Church leaders balked at the new levy and appealed to Pope Boniface to help them resist the taxes. The Players OK, So before we go any further, I need to introduce the players in a little more detail. First, Philip IV the Fair: First, the Fair refers to his complexion and NOT his character. The grandson of Louis IX, Philip has been described as fair of face, and unfair by nature. He is famous for two things, debasing French currency and incorporating judicial torture into the French legal system. Because he needed a great deal of money, he came up with all kinds of new ways to fleece his subjects. One historian has observed that the maxim that he lived by was the Roman adage quod principi placuit legis habet vigorum (whatever pleases the king has the force of law). Philip was vain, greedy, and ruthless, and had a real genius for politics. He was, in short, a very nasty piece of work! Pope Boniface VIII wasn t much better. He was elected after the papacy of the hermit pope, Celestine V. Celestine was a pious monk, the darling of the mendicant sects, but an unwilling pope. His is known for only two official acts as pope. One was to write an edict that made it legal for a pope to resign from office. Celestine then did just that; he abdicated after about 6 months in office. An abdicated pope was a political liability, so Boniface imprisoned him for the rest of his life. Boniface came from a noble family, the Gaetani, and wanted to use Peter s Chair to enrich his own family and hurt his family s rivals. He was hardly a fit vessel to be the Vicar of Christ. Dante, who may have met Boniface, consigns him to Hell, calling him the prince of the new Pharisees. The Conflict Boniface VIII was a staunch supporter of papal power, and he was anxious to make it clear that he regarded himself as overlord of Europe. In 1296, he issued a papal decree called Clericis Laicos. In it, he threatened to excommunicate any leader who imposed taxes on Church lands without his consent. But Philip responded by banning the exportation of French coinage, which kept the Church in France from sending any money to Rome. Now, that was a lot of money. Boniface was forced to back down. He had to allow the king to collect his new taxes. But that was just the first round between Philip and Boniface. In 1300, Philip arrested a French bishop for treason. The bishop was Bernard Saisset, the bishop of Pamiers, and he was fomenting trouble for Philip in fact the good bishop even tried to start a rebellion against the king. Saisset was arrested and tried for treason in a French royal court. Philip wanted the pope to degrade Saisset so that he could be tried legally before a secular court, but Boniface refused. The pope protested vigorously that clergymen could only be tried under Canon Law in a Church court, regardless of their offense. Philip reacted to Boniface s unexpected rebuff with the equivalent of a pamphlet war a PR attack. His writers questioned whether the pope had secular powers over princes, and also wrote pamphlets questioning the moral character, piety and fitness of Boniface. His best writers were Pierre DuBois, a Parisian lawyer, and John of Paris (aka Jean Quidort) a philosopher. Both of them questioned the extent that a prince of the church (specifically the pope) should intervene in secular politics. In response, Boniface, on Nov. 18, 1302, issued a new decree called Unam Sanctam. In this document Boniface insisted that the pope was the supreme power in Europe. P a g e 7 o f 12
Boniface threatened to excommunicate anyone who disagreed, with Philip at the top of the list. In the 1100s, the threat might have worked. But, by 1300, the papacy had lost most of its moral prestige, and folks were generally much more loyal to government. Most Frenchmen, even French clergymen, sided with the king. Philip responded to Boniface s edict by announcing to the French clergy that Boniface was a heretic, a criminal and was worse. He learned that the pope was staying at one of his residences in north Italy. He sent soldiers to kidnap Boniface and bring him back to Paris to stand trial before the French Church for heresy and for abusing his position. The agents captured Boniface, but discovered that he was too ill to travel, so they let him go. The pope returned to Rome, but he was so humiliated by this experience in his weakened condition that, shortly after, he died. The Avignon Captivity Boniface s death began a period of French domination of the Church. Boniface s immediate successor was an ineffectual pope who lasted for 2 years. When the cardinals convened in 1304 to choose a new pope, Philip was able to get a Frenchman, Clement V (1305-1314) elected. Clement immediately moved the headquarters of his papacy from Rome to Avignon, a city that is just a stone s throw from the French border (it is now inside of France). For the next seventy-three years, the pope ran the Church from Avignon. This period is often called the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy. It is often argued that these French popes were merely puppets to the French ruler that the French popes abandoned the cause of a strong Church. This is not entirely true. They continued to strengthen papal control over Church institutions. These popes finally gained the right to appoint outright all bishops and archbishops in Western Europe. They also meddled in the internal politics of all the countries of Western Europe, except France. But, they always sided with France in disputes with other countries, and that further weakened papal prestige, and always supported the French secular rulers. As a result of the meddling of the Avignon popes in non-french affairs, secular monarchs began to take action to strengthen their power at home, and to protect their interests against the Church. In England, for instance, since the papacy became identified with the French enemy, kings began to restrict payments to the Church and began to use Parliament to elect leaders of the English Church. Eventually, popular dissatisfaction with the situation forced the popes to leave Avignon and return to Rome. But this move itself soon created an even more serious problem for the Church. In 1378, the cardinals came to Rome to hold a papal election for the first time since 1305. There was considerable popular pressure for them to choose an Italian. In fact, a Roman mob convened outside the Cardinals meeting place and informed the College that if that august body wanted to continue breathing, they would elect an Italian pope. The Cardinals complied. The new pope was Urban VI (1378-1389). He was a reformer, and he immediately set out to correct abuses that had arisen over the last 70 years. But his proposed reforms offended the French cardinals, who were quite numerous. The French left and returned to Avignon. Once there, they repudiated Urban VI and elected a new French pope, Clement VII (1378-1394). Now there were two popes one at Rome and one at Avignon. Both claimed to be the sole head of the Church. There continued to be two sets of popes until 1417. The Churches of Western Europe split, with some recognizing one group and some recognizing the other. Thus, the period from 1378 to 1417 is known as the Great Schism. This episode created serious problems for the average Catholic. How was a person to decide which pope was the true pope, the traditional representative of God on earth, the vicar of Christ, with a plenitude of power? How can any pope claim to be the representative of God on earth, when the choice of pope is so obviously made by fallible men? P a g e 8 o f 12
The High Middle Ages If we draw a line representing the quality of life in Western Europe, the progress or decline of civilization, the line would look like this. From the end of the Roman Empire, there was a steady decline in civilization. There is some improvement around the time of Charlemagne,, but after 850, there is rapid decline for 150 years. Progress comes back again after 1000. Government grows stronger in Germany; the Church has more power; and trade begins to expand in Western Europe. This period of progress from 1000-1300 is called the High Middle Ages. After a long period in which European towns had been getting smaller and less numerous, they began to grow in size and numbers again after 1000. By 1000, feudalism was established. It was a weak kind of government, but it provided enough order for local trade to resume. The restoration of order, along with certain improvements in farming, led to a general increase in population in Western Europe and an overall rise in economic production. And all this led to a growth in trade. Manors were able to produce surpluses and exchange goods with each other,. Moreover, many manors had surplus peasants who would leave the land to look for new ways of making a living. Most important, long-range trade with distant lands, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean, began to grow again. The crusades, beginning in 1098, reestablished stronger and more direct ties with the Holy Land and with Byzantium. The Western Europeans carried food and raw materials to the East in exchange for luxury goods that were not available at home. Trade, especially trade with the East, largely determined where towns would be located and what they would be like. They developed in places that were favorable for trade and relatively secure from attack. Cities became large and numerous first in northern Italy, because this region was closest to the eastern markets. Later they spread. Because a common term for fort was the word burg, townsmen were often called bourgeoisie men of the burg. But trade was so important in the cities, that this term also came very quickly to mean merchant or trader. P a g e 9 o f 12
New institutions grew up to direct economic activity in the towns. They were organizations of men in the same business. In Latin they were called collegia, which we translate as guilds. There were two types of guilds: guilds of merchants or traders and guilds of manufacturers or craftsmen. The merchant guilds were the earliest and were, at first, the most important ones. I will start with them. The first guilds were simply bands of local traders who traveled together from town to town for mutual protection. But as long-range trade grew up, they came to have an economic function. Merchants who brought in distant goods found that they could insure a high profit if they agreed to sell the same types of goods at a fixed high price in any given city. In cities with lots of foreign trade, they often came to dominate town government. They used this power to exclude merchants from other cities and maintain a monopoly. This would be viewed as bad today, but it was necessary in the early period to protect traders from too much competition. The Guilds The craft guilds performed a similar function for craftsmen in each city. They only existed in towns large enough to have several men engaged in the same occupation. A guild would be made up of everyone in the town who owned a shop that produced the same kind of items. For example, there would be a guild of carpenters. The men who had carpenter shops of their own ran the guild. They were called masters of the guild. They agreed that they would all sell the same type of merchandise, for the same price. They also set up a system to train new carpenters to insure that they would all be able to produce work of equal quality. If a young man wanted to be a carpenter, he had to bind himself out to a master of the guild. These bound men were called apprentices. The apprentice worked in the shop for the master, doing odd jobs and learning the basic skills a carpenter needed. The length of time required for an apprenticeship and the number of apprentices in each shop was fixed by the guild. When an apprenticeship was completed, the apprentice became what was called a journeyman. A journeyman is one who works for day wages. The journeyman could move from shop to shop in the town, doing somewhat more advanced work for the various masters and gradually P a g e 10 o f 12
perfecting his skills. When the journeyman had learned enough, he would be ready to become a master and open a shop of his own. To do this, he had to prepare a sample of his skills called a master work or a masterpiece. If the masters of the guild thought that it was up to their standards, he could open his own shop. No one who was not approved could be a carpenter. So the system insured a high level of workmanship among craftsmen. But it also gave the masters a way to prevent new competing shops from being set up. Later on, when the towns stopped growing, they did just that, causing considerable unrest in many cities. During the High Middle Ages, as towns grew and demand grew more masterpieces were approved. When towns stopped growing, they quit approving the journeymen s work. Revival of Education The growth of cities made it possible to have formal education again, and educational institutions that are still with us gradually emerged during this period. This is one of the most important aspects of the recovery of Europe. Before 1000, the only formal education in Western Europe was provided by small schools in the monasteries or in the cathedrals of bishops and archbishops. It was from them that universities developed. The Church maintained these schools largely to teach clergy Latin and other basic subjects needed for their work. The schools were small and scattered at first, but, with the recovery of Europe, they began to attract more students. Both Church leaders and political leaders promoted the schools to develop needed skills and knowledge. In 1158, Frederick Barbarossa granted a charter to the cathedral school at Bologna in north Italy. He made the school a separate institution for the study of Roman law. It was the first university. Somewhat earlier, the cathedral school at Paris combined with several monastic schools to study theology more fully. The combined schools were recognized by the king in 1200. As these institutions grew, the number of students increased. They soon came into conflict with the townsmen over the prices of food and rooms and various other problems. The students and teachers realized that they had to organize themselves for protection from the townsmen. They took over the only type of organization they knew about, the guild organization. Thus, each university was divided up into collegia or colleges. They provided not only a means of dealing with the townsmen, but also a way of carrying on education. It was organized along the same lines as training in a craft guild, but with certain modifications. Every student needed the same basic education regardless of the field he eventually wished to follow. So there was one basic college that everyone went through as an apprentice so to speak. Since ancient times, it was recognized that all educated men needed to know the basic intellectual subjects called the liberal arts. Thus, the basic college was the College of Arts. Each student spent four years in this college learning the basic subjects. Then he took an exam. If he passed, he became a bachelor of arts and could go on to more advanced subjects. When this study was successfully completed, the students became full members of their respective colleges. They could teach in them or go on to other work requiring their expertise. Members of the college of arts were called masters of art. Members of other colleges had other titles such as Doctor of Medicine or Doctor of Philosophy. Doctor means learned man. To gain these titles, the students had to prepare masterpieces samples of what they had learned in the form of masters theses and doctoral dissertations. These works had to be presented and defended to the members of the college. These defenses were open to the public. Scholasticism In the church schools and universities, scholars were taught to study and to argue logically about ideas. But since the schools were church institutions, most of the ideas debated had to do with Christian religion and theology in some way. A new type of philosophy developed called scholasticism the philosophy of the schools. The scholastics used the logical reasoning of ancient philosophers to examine and explain Christian theology and teaching. Most earlier Christian writers had agreed that reason and logical argument could be used to discover the truth about some things, even though many Christian ideas had to be accepted on faith. Since the time of St. Augustine, however, there had been very little original philosophical speculation in Western Europe. Over the centuries, the same ideas had been passed down from generation to generation and were accepted without question. The basis of most Christian theology of the Early Middle Ages was the system of St. Augustine. The more philosophical ideas were drawn from Plato whom St. Augustine had used. Aristotle was also highly respected. His ideas were in conflict with Plato to some extent, but men in the Early Middle Ages had only two books of Aristotle and did not understand him fully. When the scholastics began to argue logically about what these men had written, conservative thinkers were increasingly upset. Scholasticism P a g e 11 o f 12
raised the question: How much of Christian teaching must be accepted on faith and how much can reason and logical argument be used to justify or modify teaching? This became the major intellectual question of the High Middle Ages. Royal Authority and the High Middle Ages The growth of towns and city institutions was not only an advance in itself, but it also promoted other kinds of progress. Some of this progress is obvious. Intellectual activity increased, and Europe no longer had to rely solely on farming economically. Beyond that, the growth of towns also aided the kings of Western Europe in their efforts to reduce the power of their vassals and to strengthen their own control over government. Some towns were jealous of their independence and opposed efforts of rulers to exercise direct control over them. As we saw, the Lombard towns in Italy resented the German kings. But most townsmen supported stronger central government because it helped trade by providing a higher level of internal order. Moreover, the growth of cities gave the kings powerful new advantages in their struggle with their vassals. The cities produced a new class of men experienced in business or educated in the universities. The kings could use them as paid administrators. It was no longer necessary for the kings to employ administrators from among their vassals who would be paid in land and who might eventually become independent and oppose royal power. One of the main practical supports of feudalism was destroyed, and the feudal regime began to weaken. Additionally, the wealth of towns could be taxed by the king. Towns paid their taxes in real money (gold and silver) rather than in services or food. This gave kings more independence from their vassals because kings could use the money that they raised from the towns to hire troops to fight for them. So, a mutually satisfying relationship grew up between Western European monarchs and towns in the High Middle Ages that strengthened both. P a g e 12 o f 12