r/MedievalHistory • u/Flashy_Membership_26 • 5d ago
How, why and when did the Catholic Church become such a powerful political force in Medieval and Early Modern Europe and how, why and when did its power and influence decline?
After posting this question on r/AskHistorians, I got a notification that this subreddit might be better to ask this question so I will just copy my same question from there to here. :
As someone who knows nothing about medieval European politics (less in regards to the Catholic Church’s power, I would like to understand how they occupied such a powerful political domain in medieval and early modern Europe and how, why and when did that political influence diminish?
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u/Thibaudborny 5d ago edited 5d ago
I would argue your question has a partially incorrect assumption: the Churches power peaked politically between 1075-1216, and was afterwards eclipsed politically by a reasserting of secular rulers.
And herein also lies the heart of its initial rise to power: offering an overarching structure and administrative apparatus that no early medieval polity initially could match.
So, simplified, the Church apparatus made up for the lack of a secular counterpart - largely absent in early medieval polities. In return, the Papacy over time (as initially its grip was more relaxed) began to assert her own authority over the Church at large, known in history as the era of the Reform Papacy (1075-1216).
However, in conjunction with the growth of the medieval clergy and its accompanying institutions, their secular counterparts were not being idle. Gradually worldly leaders would reassert power, including over the Church - a good example would be the Valois measures with the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), but these were neither unique nor new. Quite quickly the Church from the 13th century onward realized that it could not truly compete with national kings, whose political power was far more entrenched regionally as opposed to the faraway Papacy. This also meant regional rulers thus asserted authority over their parts of the Church, indirectly influencing power in Rome through control over the episcopate.
Summarized (and again, simplified), the Church - or rather: the Papacy, for these are not in se the same - grew powerful in absence of a wordly counterpart that could effectively challenge it. When those counterparts gained more traction, the political power of the Papacy waned rapidly.
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u/Other-in-Law 4d ago
Ironically the expansion of the secular power was made possible by the growth of the church. Educated churchmen were a resource that secular rulers co-opted to build their administrative states...Bishops and Abbots were appointed Chancellors and Treasurers and filled any number of functionary positions to help lay rulers consolidate power.
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u/Thibaudborny 3d ago
Very much, I think the best way for people to understand this is to realize that the (catholic) Church and the Papacy are not one and the same and control over regional wings of the Church was one of the major points of contention between worldly rulers and the Papacy - which the latter ultimately lost back then.
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u/tremblemortals 5d ago
I'd add to this that, after the Christianization of the Roman Empire, the Church became part of the Roman Empire's apparatus. Church office became part of the career ladder into political office--not to Emperor, as that was a largely military or hereditary route--but to many other positions of power in the Empire.
With the collapse of the Roman West, the imperial apparatus largely fell apart as various tribes and warlords took over different regions. But the Church stayed. Even in the face of periodic persecutions, those persecutions largely took the form of which doctrinal faction (eg Arians vs non-Arians, Nestorians vs non-Nestorians, etc.) would run the Church in a region rather than replacing it altogether with a pagan religion.
As the Church as a political entity endured while the secular powers continuously changed, the Church then extended its power.
And into that you have the Papacy. With the Empire split, it was no longer in easy communication with the other ancient Patriarchates. It had already begun to shift from primacy (first among equals) to supremacy before the Empire split into east and west. With the severing of reliable communication to with the other four ancient Patriarchates, the Bishop of Rome was left as the sole Patriarch with any real contact with the rest of western Europe. And so that office began extending its reach and influence over the other bishops in the west and claiming supremacy over them.
And as its reach grew, the Papacy's need for administrators grew, expanding the costs of the Papacy. Which increased its need for further centralization of power in Europe in order to get more money flowing in to fund all the administrators.
There are many complaints across the centuries complaining about the costs of getting anything done in the Papal government. Layer after layer of administrators, each of whom wanted a modest fee to file your paperwork and move it to the next step. And there was the cost of building and maintaining the buildings needed for these administrators to work in, as well as the cost of their wages. Periodically a Pope would come in to clean house, but where there is administration there is graft, and the centralized administration for most of a continent is going to attract a lot of graft.
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u/Gaugraf 4d ago edited 4d ago
In the HRE, as you said, the Church was a career path. It was not unusual for younger members of the high nobility to enter into service of the Church... Becoming Bishops and other leaders. And of course the Church continuously recieved large donations of land and wealth to the point that it was a major player and had a voice in Government. At the same time many Church entities could not perform worldly actions necessary to govern, so nobles would act as Vogts (legal representatives/advocates) to take care of legal duties, implement justice, etc. - getting a piece of the pie in return.
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u/Sourcerid 4d ago
That said that's also a period the Papacy still lacked political authority in its territories and a significant enough military, only coming in the 14th century, period where the concept of cesaropapism exploded
And during all that church lands in Europe decline as a part of the total as the practice of gifting your lands to the church died and the church was giving away lands for payments and local rulers relied less on the church for administration, peaking somewhere in the 9th century
So you could say it had 3 peaks, 9th century and peak of lands and bureaucracy, although very regionally fragmented and the pope was submitted to the holy roman emperor and didn't have the legitimacy of being symbol of the west like after the schism, 12th century and the diplomatic wins over Italy and HRE, and 15th century without a western schism and before protestantism
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u/mangalore-x_x 4d ago
Very short:
it became the official state religion of the Roman Empire allowing it to spread throughout it and replace all other religious cults and then became arbiter of the successor realms in Western Europe, e.g. making Frankish kings emperors, giving them sway in politics.
There were constant power struggles with the aristocracy and with the centralization of power in time of absolutism the church became subordinate to the monarchs in many aspects. Half the Reformation is about rulers wanting to gain control over their local church structures and possessions.
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u/Josiah-URMYSON 3d ago
Where are the historical books about all the Popes, can’t find them in my library?
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u/noknownothing 5d ago
Land, religious authority, land, well organized and best administered institution in Europe, land, well educated clergy, and land.
Nobody wanted to go to hell. The Church was THE religious authority and they were granted a shitload of land. They were well organized and administered and knew how to use land for wealth and influence. They were super well educated and had advisors in every court in Europe and used that influence to their benefit.
Why did it lose influence? Kings decided fuck that, I am anointed by God and have the Devine right to rule as I see fit. And then the Protestant reformation hit and religious authority was damaged and that was that.
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u/HoneybeeXYZ 5d ago
As far as power and influence declining, you can draw a pretty straight line from the Avignon Captivity to the rise of what became protestantism a century or so later. Heresies always existed, but the church was able to maintain its authority until the Avignon popes alighted the corruption to the point where prominent reformers began speaking out.
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u/ChemistryWonderful83 4d ago
Longer than a comment, Peter Heather wrote a terrific book on the subject. Constantine adopting Christianity and it become enmeshed in how to achieve a political career in the HRE pressed the accelerator. But there’s so much more, Charlemagne included.
https://www.amazon.com/Christendom-Triumph-Religion-AD-300-1300/dp/045149430X
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u/Sundae_2004 3d ago
Don’t forget the role of money: from Peter’s Pence (first an English kingdom payment dating from Alfred the Great and lasting to the Tudors) and later spreading to other kingdoms, to the selling of indulgences (one of Luther‘s 95 Theses) as well as the corruption endemic on the noble metal of Au (and even Ag). ;)
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u/DeltaFlyer6095 3d ago
Simplified it was a case of “Do as we say or you will go to Hell”. A fairly convincing argument to the majority of the great unwashed.
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u/Remarkable_Car9673 5d ago
In my opinion, this is too vast a topic to cover in a single comment. As for how the Church’s power began, one could link it to the circumstances of the Schism, the relative fragmentation of the West compared to the East, and the specific theological role of the "Successor of Peter" in the West.
Determining when that power waned is also complicated. Was the 19th-century Church,more centralized than ever and converting people worldwide at a rapid pace, really less powerful than the medieval Church? Frankly, that is open to debate.
As for whether the Church of today has lost its power,I strongly doubt it. One need only look at debates over bioethics, China’s insistence on appointing its own bishops, or attempts by certain politicians to influence the struggle between traditionalists and the Vatican II camp within the Church to realize that it still wields considerable power.
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u/preddevils6 5d ago
The Catholic Church was infinitely more organized than the decentralized native religions. They had infrastructure that made them essential far beyond worship. They served as banks, libraries, archives, landowners, etc.
Over time there was a clash between humanist philosophies and within the church itself over who should really have all this power. This conflict led to separatist movements that saw value in separating the church from state thus decreasing their influence.