The Catholic Church was once the most important, omnipresent institution in Europe. Before we meet the Medici Popes, we’ll delve into what exactly the Church did for the people, from providing early nursing homes to giving people one of the few shots at social mobility, and how powerful the Popes really were.
Transcript
I originally said that I was going to start with the life of the new head of the Medici family, Giovanni de’ Medici, who becomes Pope Leo X, but I realized that this is a huge shift away from what we’ve been talking about, mainly the happenings in Florence and northern Italy, to the politics of the Catholic Church. So I decided it was probably be better if I first do a context episode laying down general information about the Church and the papacy.
I won’t go into the entire history of the Catholic Church up to the Renaissance. There’s other history podcasts for that, like the History of the Papacy podcast. But I do think it’s important to understand that the rise of what we call the Catholic Church was very sudden and revolutionary. With Emperor Constantine in the fourth century converting to Christianity and giving state support to Christian clergy and entrusting the clergy with certain local administrative responsibilities, Christian clergy became literally overnight wealthy landowners and powerful partners in the government. The Christian church was richer, more organized, and more independent from the state than practically or perhaps any polytheist institution that existed in the Roman and Greek world within historical memory.
The collapse of the Western Roman Empire set what we know as the Catholic Church on a trajectory that would make it unique even among other Christian churches. In the Byzantine Empire, the clergy was still wealthy and in some ways able to assert their own power against the state, of course, but the state in the Byzantine Empire was still strong and centralized. The emperors could and did intervene in theological matters, just like Emperor Constantine and his successors did. The most famous example of this by far is Emperor Leo III in the eighth century coming out against the use of images in worship and the initiative by Empress Irene less than a century later reversing that decision, but it wasn’t the only case.
Meanwhile, in the west, the empire was reduced to being ruled by kings who in modern terms were really more like warlords. Even when Charlemagne united much western and central Europe under one monarch through conquest, the self-proclaimed emperors of the west didn’t have nearly as much of the same reach, even over the church, as their counterparts in Constantinople. It wasn’t just that Charlemagne’s father King Pippin gave the bishop of Rome his own territory and vassals. When the Roman administration in western Europe fell apart, it was the Church that for the most part remained the only source of stability west of the borders of the Byzantine Empire.
So the Church was a major presence in people’s lives in a way that has no parallel today, even in parts of the Western world that remain predominantly religious. Unless you were part of a Jewish or Muslim minority community, baptizing your children, attending church, and paying tithes were practically compulsory, enforced by social pressure if not by local authorities. Churches were also the major social center where you would hear the news, learn about new laws being passed or the new war that broke out, and socialize with your friends. Parish priests even organized social clubs for women and men, although these were held separately of course. If you were a peasant man, the Church was also your only shot at getting an education. It was also almost certainly your only chance at social mobility other than becoming a soldier or joining a mercenary company. For women across the social spectrum, unless you were really lucky in what the attitudes of your fathers or male guardians were, the Church was the only way besides maybe becoming a widow you could escape having to get married and bear children and enjoy at least a sliver of personal independence.
The Church was also the closest thing to a welfare state medieval Europe had. This isn’t to say there weren’t bishops and monasteries that grew decadently rich, there very much were, but the money paid to the Church in tithes did actually come back to their communities in some ways other than an extravagantly decorated cathedral. The Church funded and helped run poor relief efforts and established hospitals, hospices, orphanages, leper houses, and even rudimentary nursing homes for the elderly poor that had no relatives able or willing to tend to them. They also funded the construction of new bridges and roads in certain perishes. If you traveled in medieval Europe it was rare that you’d actually find a tavern that would put you up for the night. Instead, it was mostly monasteries that provided travelers with food and lodging. Monasteries and parish priests also tended to run the only grammar schools available in most towns and rural areas, although these only taught the bare basics and the sons of peasants rarely could attend unless they were lucky enough to be sponsored by a wealthy person or receive a scholarship or endowment. This isn’t to say the Church did and paid for everything. Especially later in the Middle Ages when governments became more centralized and populations were getting large enough that it strained the Church’s resources, you do see kings, nobles, and city leaders donating land and property to hospitals and other such institutions and instituting special taxes to support leper houses and the like. On a less positive note, the Church also ran courts that punished heresy and what were considered moral crimes like adultery and sodomy, although they handed those convinced over to secular magistrates for their actual punishment. But this is why during the Reformation people fought so hard against rulers like King Henry VIII of England who sought to abolish the monasteries and change the roles of the churches. It wasn’t just about the right religious practices or their way of life. People were losing the institutions that had helped their families and neighbors their entire lives.
Now what I’m about to say is something historians still argue about, but I think the evidence and recent scholarship suggests that the dominance of the Church over social and political life doesn’t mean people at the time had such radically different mindsets concerning religion and God. It’s extremely likely there were more devout people back then than in the Western world today. But I think people’s attitudes broke down in more or less the same way as you might see in the present. There were people who were absolute zealots, people who had faith and believed in all the tenets of the religion but were not fanatical and were even open-minded, people who thought of themselves as devout but had their own radical ideas about the tenets of their religion or God itself, and even people we’d today call freethinkers and atheists. It’s this last point that would raise the most controversy, since there are respected historians who still flat-out argue that nothing like modern atheism could have been part of a medieval person’s outlook. To put it bluntly, I think this is wrong, to the point that I wonder if the people arguing this ever really looked at medieval sources (It’s worth pointing out I’ve mostly personally only seen this argument from historians of Renaissance and Enlightenment-era Europe, and very rarely from actual medievalists.) From Inquisition trial records and fictional literature, I think it’s clear there were people who doubted as a result of their own personal ideas and experiences, even if for reasons that I hope are obvious there wasn’t a lot of freethinking literature in the Middle Ages. To go outside Christendom, in the medieval Caliphate there was the poet Abu Al-Ala al-Ma’ari (Abu Al-Alay al-Ma’ar-eye) whose work expressed belief in the existence of a creator God but also denied the existence of an afterlife and dismissed all religions, including Islam, as “fairy tales.” Back in Christendom, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was widely rumored to be an atheist, to the point that Pope Gregory IX accused him of believing that Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were all imposters. Even if Frederick II wasn’t actually an atheist in modern terms, it does mean non-belief in any god was certainly a possibility.
I should probably stop here. I’m just fascinated by the topic of unconventional thinkers in the Middle Ages. But if you want to hear more about the topic of medieval atheism, Professor Alec Ryrie’s lecture “How To Be An Atheist in Medieval Europe” is available online. I’ll post a link in the show notes.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand, my point is that just because there were intense social pressures and even threats of legal punishment and even death to believe, that doesn’t mean everyone was a believer or understood what Christianity was about. This brings us to two main problems with the medieval Church that the Reformation would try to fix (although Protestants would end up repeating the same problems in their own ways). The first was that in a time of low literacy rates and nothing even approaching the scale of today’s universal education systems, many people were really badly educated in the fundamentals of Christianity. Even a great number of rural parish priests were either barely literate, if at all, and didn’t really grasp the nuances of difficult theological points like the trinity or how Jesus’ crucifixion absolved all of humanity. Or they developed and promoted their own independent ideas about theology. An extreme but interesting case is a trial record where Beatrice de Planissoles in southern France was seduced by a priest. To her arguments that it was a grave sin to sleep with a priest, he calmly answered that she was actually a greater sin to have sex with one’s husband, because wives usually didn’t realize that it was a sin too, so it wasn’t that dire a thing to become the lover of a priest. As discussed in the classic book The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, a sixteenth-century miller from northeastern Italy named Menocchio that the earth was formed out of the chaos like a big chunk of cheese, God and the angels spontaneously appeared like worms on the cheese, that Jesus was the Son of God but was sent to just teach humanity and not to die for their sins, and that the only sin was to harm one’s neighbor. Who knew how many Menocchios there were in medieval Europe that didn’t appear in the records?
The second problem was the fact that the Church wasn’t just an avenue for spiritual salvation and comfort. It was an avenue for power and influence. The income you could get from holding an office in the Church was lucrative or at least it could lend prestige to local elites. Even early in the Middle Ages, the top roles in the Church like abbot or bishop were in many places monopolized by royal and noble families. It didn’t help either that the priesthood and monasteries became dumping grounds for deposed royals, extra sons who didn’t stand a chance of getting a share of their father’s inheritance, and daughters who were considered unmarriageable or whose parents couldn’t afford to pay a marriage dowry. This no doubt fed into the Church’s constant problem of having priests, even prominent bishops, who barely bothered tending to their obligations to their congregations or who led less than holy lifestyles. One of the scandals that eventually inspired Martin Luther was when Albrecht, Archbishop of Magdeburg, also got himself named Archbishop of Mainz just to politically benefit his family, the Hohenzollerns who ruled over the northern German principality of Brandenburg. Then there were the sex scandals caused by worldly clergy. In his surviving letters, the bishop Ivo of Chartres was horrified when the Archbishop of Tours in 1097 pulled some strings to have a young man named Jean elected the bishop of Orléans. The new bishop’s youth turned out to be the least of Ivo’s concerns; he was also the lover of both the Archbishop and his brother. Ivo claimed that he was so enraged that he went straight to King Philippe I of France who allegedly only laughed and joked to Ivo that he had slept with Jean himself. Much later, a sixteenth-century archbishop of Salzburg, Wolf Dietrich von Raittenau, openly lived with a woman who bore him fifteen children.
These are all admittedly extreme examples, but they do illustrate a real problem with people who assumed leadership roles in the Church solely for political reasons or with rank-and-file priests who flaunted the rules on celibacy which became strictly imposed by the twelfth century. Still, it needs to be stressed that the medieval church wasn’t static, which is the impression you might get from a bad documentary on the Reformation. Local and church-wide reform movements addressing these very problems were constantly being launched. In fact, on the eve of the Reformation, growing literacy did mean parish priests were becoming more educated and better at teaching the basics of religion. Part of the problem, though, was that the Church was too good at fostering new movements that went against other branches of the Church. In fact, much of the anti-clergy rhetoric that would later be whipped up by Protestants came out of the disputes between different orders and branches of the Church. To quote Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation: A History: “Friars sneered at parish priests for being lazy and ignorant; parish priests sneered at friars for being egotistical showmen who tried to seduce women at the confessional; friars sneered at monks for being useless and idle consumers of landed wealth. Even friars sneered at friars, because there were several refoundations of Orders trying to return to early simplicity, particularly among the Franciscans, and the reformers had every reason to denigrate those colleagues of their own Order who opposed such reforms.”
Finally, there’s the Pope. None of the other Christian churches have had such a singular figurehead. As I touched on in our earliest episodes, the Pope was once just the bishop of Rome, one among several prominent patriarchs around Christendom. For a period in the early Middle Ages, when the Byzantine Empire still had a strong presence in Italy, several popes were handpicked by the Byzantine emperors and Pope Martin I angered Emperor Constans II so much he was kidnapped by imperial troops and sent into exile. But over the centuries the bishops of Rome claimed a prominence in western and central Europe that wasn’t even matched by the most preeminent church leader in the Greek-speaking world, the Patriarch of Constantinople.
At the height of their power, the Popes claimed the right to choose the appointees to higher church offices and even depose any Christian monarch. But papal power was often challenged, leading to genuine wars, as we saw with the story of Matilda of Tuscany. Some within the Church itself argued that the decisions of church councils should trump the Pope himself. Outside the Church, the Holy Roman Emperors sometimes pressed the idea that the jurisdiction of the Popes should be restricted to the spiritual realm entirely, and the kings of France toyed with the idea that kings, not the Pope in Rome, were the true leaders of the Churches in their domains. The most radical and successful church reform movements, namely the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia, rejected papal authority altogether.
By the time of the Renaissance, the idea of papal supremacy had already gone into decline. The Pope still had some weight across Europe, but his image was tarnished by the ultimate failure of the Crusades to keep Jerusalem under Christian control or check the Ottoman menace, the overuse of the tactic of threatening to excommunicate rulers, and the Great Schism. It certainly didn’t help that since the end of the Great Schism the papacy kept getting embroiled in Italian regional power struggles, the most sordid of which was how Pope Sixtus and Pope Alexander both ruthlessly exploited their own Church’s wealth and resources and started wars with the other Italian nations just to establish permanent power bases for their own relatives.
So when Giovanni de’ Medici became Pope Leo X, he found himself the leader of a church that had its scandals and its flaws and was certainly richer than ever before, but was still a powerful and positive presence in some people’s lives. Certainly the papacy itself wasn’t what it used to be, back when a groveling King John of England was forced to acknowledge Pope Innocent III as his overlord, but the Popes had ended the Schism and recently defeated the critics who wanted the Pope to be subservient to church councils. And the Pope still at least could command a significant degree of authority as far away as Portugal, Norway, and Livonia. The new Pope Leo X had no reason whatsoever at all to suspect anything significant would change.
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