In the early winter months of 1077, Henry IV, king of Germany and Italy, future emperor, made the perilous trek over the snow-covered Alps into Italy, with the queen pulled along behind on oxhides. His long journey ended at the gates of Canossa, a hilltop fortress overlooking the North Italian plain. Here he waited for three days in the snow, barefoot, stripped of his regal paraphernalia, begging absolution from the pope, Gregory VII.
One year earlier Henry had denounced Gregory, calling him a ‘false monk’ who did not fear God. Gregory, in retaliation, had given one of the most extraordinary decrees in papal history:
“in the name of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I withdraw, through thy power and authority, from Henry the king, son of Henry the emperor, who has risen against thy church with unheard-of insolence, the rule over the whole kingdom of the Germans, and over Italy. I absolve all Christians from the bonds of oath which they have made or shall make to him; and I forbid anyone to serve him as king.”[1]
Henry and Gregory were fighting a battle over the limits of divine and worldly power, and this battle has ebbed and flowed through centuries of Western history. Even today the place of religion in the modern ‘secular’ state is subject to fierce debate. The pope’s authority to criticise the people and practices of secular politics is likewise a contentious contemporary issue.
Why did the pope believe that he had the right – and even the duty – to depose the king? Why was the most powerful man in Europe begging so humbly before the bishop of Rome? To answer these questions we must delve into the medieval mind-set, and understand that Christianity and the Church had a very deep and often complex relationship with every aspect of medieval life.
In these weighty questions of religious politics, as in so much else, the Middle Ages (c. 450 – c. 1450) were not a period of stagnation, but were rather one of innovation and creation in the face of new political, cultural, and religious challenges. This course, HUMA592 -Medieval Christianity, will allow students to explore the medieval response to these challenges through one of the period’s most distinctive features: its faith.
The beliefs, practices, philosophy, and institutions of that faith have left many a mark on Western culture. The sprawling bureaucracy of the high medieval Church created a form of pan-European government on a scale not attempted again until the late twentieth century. The Crusades foreshadowed the age of military and missionary colonialism. The spiritual lives of monks, nuns, and hermits redefined man’s relationship with his inner self. The lives of holy men and women, friars, and anchorites challenged the meaning of wealth and poverty, social conformity and social protest. Even the humble parish, with its small church, local clergy, and tangled web of personal relationships, formed the basis for a kind of community that dominated the lives of ordinary Europeans, and was recreated – albeit with the revisions made inevitable by new circumstances – by the earliest settlers in the New World.
Students will get the chance to study these themes, and many more, through the letters, plays, chronicles, prayers, legal and political documents that have come down to us from the Middle Ages. This is a great opportunity to study 1,000 years of the history of one of the world’s great religions through the words of the men and women who experienced it first-hand. I can’t wait for the discussion to begin, and I hope to see you there!
HUMA 592 – Medieval Christianity will be running Autumn 2016 on Thursdays 13:00 – 15:30.
[1] B. Tierney, The Middle Ages: Volume 1: Sources of Medieval History (5th ed., New York, 1992), p. 148.
