These groups, basically and professedly orthodox, together with the reform-minded Humiliati of Lombardy (Italy), practiced poverty, Scripture reading, and preaching. The Cathari were proscribed as heretics by the papacy and were attacked by a Crusade and later by the Inquisition, and they gradually disappeared. The Humiliati remained orthodox as a quasi-religious order. The Waldenses, largely through mismanagement by the bishops and papal refusal to allow them to preach, drifted away from the church. Officially condemned as heretical by Pope Lucius III (reigned 1181–85), they remained a non-Catholic body through the Middle Ages and afterward.
These heretical movements suggest that the great sense of purpose and energy that had opened the 12th century had been lost by the century’s last decades, which were notably barren of saints and other leaders. They also reflected the church’s inadequate response to changing social and economic conditions, such as the growth of towns and trade, and to the spiritual needs of the growing urban population of Europe. Moreover, the church was deemed too materialistic, and the pope himself seemed either part of the problem or unable to resolve the church’s difficulties. Religious life in the 13th century
The 13th century was an age of fresh endeavour and splendid maturity in the realms of philosophy, theology, and art, and it has traditionally been regarded as the high point of medieval civilization. The revival of religious life and culture in the period was heralded by the vigorous papacy of Innocent III, one of the youngest and most energetic popes to hold the throne of St. Peter. As pope, Innocent intervened in the political affairs of various European rulers and expanded the jurisdictional claims of his predecessors, preparing the way for the great lawyer-popes of the 13th century. He was an advocate of Crusades in the Holy Land and against heretics. Concerned as well with the religious life of the church, he co-opted the mendicant movement of the Waldenses by recognizing the order of St. Francis and some groups of Humiliati. He also held the fourth Lateran Council (1215), one of the most important church councils of the Middle Ages.
The coming of the friars and the legislation of the fourth Lateran Council—including requirements of annual confession and Communion and a reduction in the number of impediments to marriage—saved the lower classes for the church and silenced many critics of the establishment. Well-trained and extremely mobile, the friars were able to reach and hold regions and peoples that the static monks and clergy had failed to persuade. The friars were also closely associated with the Beguines, a laywomen’s religious movement with roots in the late 12th century.
The 13th century in Europe as a whole was a time of pastoral activity in which bishops and university-trained clergy perfected the diocesan and parish organization and reformed many abuses. Nevertheless, the period was not without its share of controversies. The Beguines faced skepticism and prejudice despite their promotion of chastity, contemplation, and labour. The mendicants also encountered opposition. The early friars served and were welcomed by the bishops and parish clergy, but clashes soon occurred; the papacy gave the friars exemptions and privileges so wide that the basic rights of the secular clergy were threatened. An academic “war of pamphlets” led to an attack on the vocation and work of the friars. Finally, Boniface VIII (reigned 1294–1303) arranged a compromise that was just and workable; under a revised form it lasted for two centuries. A bishop could refuse friars entry into his diocese, but, once they had been admitted, the friars were free of his control. The golden age of Scholasticism
Philosophy, hitherto concerned almost exclusively with logic and dialectic, had stagnated in the late 12th century. It was revived by the gradual arrival from Spain and Sicily of translations of the entire corpus of Aristotle, often accompanied by Arabic and Hebrew commentaries and treatises. Through these works, especially the Metaphysics and the Ethics, the whole field of philosophy was opened to the schools. After a short period of hesitation, they were used by theologians, at first eclectically and then systematically. The great Dominican thinkers St. Albertus Magnus and his more-famous pupil St. Thomas Aquinas rethought Aristotle’s system in a Christian idiom, adding to it a fair amount of Neoplatonism from Augustine. Aquinas, in some 25 years of work, set theology firmly on a philosophical foundation, especially in his Summa contra gentiles (1258–64) and Summa theologiae (1265/66–1273). The Italian theologian and Franciscan minister-general St. Bonaventure, in an even shorter career, renewed the traditional approach of Augustine and the theologians of the monastery of St. Victor regarding theology as the guide of the soul to the vision of God. At the same time, masters in the arts school of Paris used Aristotelian philosophy to construct a naturalistic system that clashed with orthodox teaching. The condemnations that ensued in 1272 and 1277, coinciding with the deaths of Bonaventure and Aquinas, included some Thomist theses. This apparent victory of conservatism ended the long era in which Greek thought was regarded as right reason and foreshadowed the age of individual systems and the divorce of philosophy from theology.
The Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, fresco by Andrea da Firenze, c. 1365; in the Spanish Chapel of the church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence.SCALA/Art Resource, New York
The persecuting society
The centralization and expansion that led to the achievements of the Roman Catholic Church in the High Middle Ages were not without their negative consequences, some of which were part of a broader societal development known as the formation of a “persecuting society.” The church defined who was a Christian and who was not and then took steps to convert or eliminate those not numbered among the faithful. Innocent III sanctioned the Albigensian Crusade (see Albigenses) against the Cathari of southern France after repeated efforts to convert them to Roman Catholicism failed. The Crusade, led by northern barons, devastated the culture and country of southern France and is notorious for the alleged comment of the papal legate prior to the sack of Béziers in 1209: “Kill them all. God will know his own.”
The church also approved of new judicial practices against heretics, which ran counter to the developing legal traditions of both church and state. In 1231 Pope Gregory IX ordered that heretics be turned over to civil authorities for punishment and approved of the use of inquisitorial practices in the pursuit of heretics. The most notorious institution of the Middle Ages, the Inquisition never attained the universal authority and centralization ascribed to it in the popular imagination, but the inquisitors, usually Franciscans or Dominicans, zealously pursued heretics, who suffered torture and, on occasion, death.
Another instance of hardening sentiment can be seen in the treatment of Jews. Between 800 and 1200 the Jewish population increased significantly in Lombardy, Provence, and the towns in the river valleys of the Rhône, the Rhine, and the Danube. They entered England only after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Apart from heretics such as the Cathari, they were the only “foreign body” in Western Christendom and, as such, attracted special notice. Accounts of violence against the Jews are recorded as early as 992 and increased in number over the coming centuries. There were shocking massacres of Jews when the Crusades were preached, especially in the Rhineland in 1096; and, after various occasions of panic among Christians, Jews were accused of a variety of antisocial crimes. They were also accused of sacrilege, and, beginning in the 12th century, Jews were accused of the alleged ritual murder of children for use of the blood in Passover celebrations. Later, Jews suffered from suspicions aroused by the Cathari, and theologians and church leaders wrote treatises condemning the Jews’ refusal to accept the faith or identified them as witnesses to the truth in their rejection of Christianity. Concern with the Jews’ rejection of Christianity led to violence against Jewish holy books, including the burning of thousands of copies of the Talmud in Paris in 1242. The fourth Lateran Council required Jews to wear a distinguishing badge and forbade their employment by governments. This established once and for all the ghetto system in large towns, though it did not at first impair Jewish prosperity. Eventually, however, the growing class of Christian merchants became jealous and hostile, and in 1290 and 1306 the Jews were expelled from England and France, respectively. Their numbers consequently increased in Germany, which thereafter was called “the classic land of Jewish martyrdom.” Small groups of Jews remained in Italy, and the Roman colony was never disturbed, in part because it enjoyed papal protection. In Spain toleration gave way to widespread persecution and conversion under duress, leaving a heritage of sorrow for the future. Michael Frassetto Michael David Knowles Francis Christopher Oakley From the late Middle Ages to the Reformation