Church And State In The Early Middle Ages

The Efforts of Crown and Cross To Control Society

Aug 13, 2009

The Papacy and the Empire both attempted to lead Christendom in the Middle Ages, to varying degrees of success. They existed in competition throughout the period.

The Carolingian dynasty of Francia, the kingdom which would form the Holy Roman Empire under the Ottonians in the tenth century, was a warlike group of kings surrounded by warlike neighbors. The Lombards to the south in Italy had been hostile to the Papal States, and Charles the Great (Charlemagne, r. 768-814) saw the need to protect Christendom through conquest. He conquered the Lombards, and became their king. The Lombards, who were Arians, accepted Catholic Christianity.

The Carolingians, Empire, and Feudalism

Charles also attempted to conquer the pagan Saxons, with mixed success. The Saxons fought hard, and constantly rose in rebellion. Charles was ruthless in conquering them, as several massacres can attest, as well as the destruction of the Irminsul, the Saxon sacred tree. Eventually the Saxon leader Widukind surrendered and accepted baptism. Fortresses and monasteries were built in the conquered territories, in order to bring the Frankish way of life, particularly their religion, to the people living there. Eventually, the Saxons submitted to Charles’ rule but without the church structure this might not have been possible.

In addition to using religion to unite their subjects, the Carolingians also imposed a system of land grants, known as benefices, upon their warriors. The beneficia were run by peasants, much the same way as the Roman latifundia, and provided the warriors with the time they needed to practice their skills. These were skills which came into play later in the era under Charles’ successors, when the second great wave of invasions set the Franks against Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims alike.

The unity of the kingdom lasted until the Treaty of Verdun in 843, when Charles’ kingdom was split three ways: The East under Louis the German, the Middle under Lothair, and the west under Charles the Bald. The anarchy caused by this caused a rather reactionary set of customs to arise, on a local basis. This system of land grants and vassalage in return for protection—at first for the monasteries (popular targets for Scandinavian raiders), later for nobles themselves, and men to work the land--defined the social structure of the medieval period to come. By the 12th century, the system had become hereditary, and would not budge for centuries to come.

The Church As A Political Entity

The Church, besides being besought by the same invaders and ravaged by the same wars, was facing problems of its own, internally and externally. The major dispute in the Church contemporary to the Carolingian dynasty was the Iconoclasm Controversy. This was started in the East, and was a belief that to use an image of Christ was to worship the image, not the man. This led to a decisive split between the pope and the Eastern Emperor, and eroded the credibility of the Church. Also, there was the problem of the transfer of secular lands into church hands and the loss of tax revenue that resulted. The actions which followed were incredibly unpopular, and led to a rebellion in Rome against the Pope, who fled to Charles’s court and crowned him “Emperor of the Romans” in 800.

Through the monasteries and constant missionary work, the church continued its presence in the lives of Europeans. When feudal society rose in Europe, an incredible amount of disunity and violence came with it, and the Church used reforms such as the Peace of God and the Truce of God, as well as getting involved in the feudal system themselves, to quell the violent behavior of the European nobility. The boon to the Church’s leadership of Europe came in 1095 when The Byzantine Emperor asked for assistance in staving off the invasions of the Seljuk Turks, to which Pope Urban II, with a cry of “Deus volt!” sent the disaffected younger sons of nobles and the unruly nobles themselves off to fight for God, not for glory.

In Conclusion

As to the relative effectiveness of the leadership of Crown and Cross, neither side managed to truly unite the population, as they paid their service to God, but only some of the nobles fought as protectors of the church, the rest squabbled with each other for their own ends. The Church was often seen by secular rulers to be interfering in affairs of state, and this led to very strained relations throughout the period, even wars in the case of Emperors such as Fredrick Barbarossa.

However, the Church, for all its internal feuding and its fractionized state of being in this time period, did manage to give illiterate and ignorant masses something intangible to live for, even if pagan practices did persist well into the high middle ages, and the church did deeply entrench itself in the politics of Western Europe. Perhaps this was the only way that it could save itself from disappearing.

Tierney, Brian and Painter Sidney. Western Europe in the Middle Ages. New York, McGraw Hill College, 1999.

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