The Catholic Empire 950-1350

The history of the world knows many past empires, some are still visible others quite forgotten, but only one has been to a successful degree concealed from history and a veil drawn on its existence and the role it played in the history of mankind; a role that still echoes in our present life.

Once we view the medieval age in Europe as the age of a specific empire then we can understand the reason behind many events and see them as parts of a whole pattern, rather than just a series of random events. As a modest contribution I list here some of the most important dates in the history of the Catholic Empire: 

910: The Empire Sows its Seed

• 910: Great Benedictine monastery of Cluny rejuvenates western monasticism. Monasteries spread throughout the isolated regions of Western Europe.

History of the Roman Catholic Church, Wikipedia

These monasteries were to play the role of the incubator for the ideas and men who would later build the Catholic Empire.

942-996: The Empire Co-opts the Normans

During his reign, Normandy became completely Gallicized and Christianized. He introduced the feudal system and Normandy became one of the most thoroughly feudalized states on the continent. He carried out a major reorganization of the Norman military system, based on heavy cavalry. He also became guardian of the young Hugh, Count of Paris, on the elder Hugh’s death in 956.

Richard I, Duke of Normandy, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

The Normans were the last of the northern tribes that settled in the lands that were part of the Roman Empire and yet they were the first to adopt the feudal rule and played a major role in spreading it, and by extension the rule of the new empire, into lands were it did not exist and by example they helped to spread it to the rest of Christendom.

962: The Empire and the Tribes

The leaders of Alemannia, Bavaria, Francia and Saxonia elected Conrad I of the Franks, not a Carolingian, as their leader in 911. His successor, Henry (Heinrich) I the Fowler (r. 919-936), a Saxon elected at the Reichstag of Fritzlar in 919, achieved the acceptance of a separate Eastern Empire by the West Frankish (still ruled by the Carolingians) in 921, calling himself Rex Francorum Orientalum (King of the East Franks). He founded the Ottonian dynasty.

Henry designated his son Otto, who was elected King in Aachen in 936, to be his successor. A marriage alliance with the widowed queen of Italy gave Otto control over that nation as well. His later crowning as Emperor Otto I (later called “the Great”) in 962 would mark an important step, since from then on the Eastern-Frankish realm - and not the West-Frankish kingdom that was the other remainder of the Frankish kingdoms - would have the blessing of the Pope. Otto had gained much of his power earlier, when, in 955, the Magyars were defeated in the Battle of Lechfeld.

…

At this time, the eastern kingdom was a “confederation” of the old Germanic tribes of the Bavarians, Alemanns, Franks and Saxons.

Holy Roman Empire, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

As the Germanic tribes rise up as a single political unit they influnce the rise of the church (see 1045-1058).

987: The Empire and the Dynasty

Hugh Capet died on 996 October 24 in Paris and was interred in the Saint Denis Basilica. His son Robert continued to reign.

Most historians regard the beginnings of modern France with the coronation of Hugh Capet. This is because, as Count of Paris, he made the city his power center. The monarch began a long process of exerting control of the rest of the country from there.

He is regarded as the founder of the Capetian dynasty. The direct Capetians, or the House of Capet, ruled France from 987 to 1328; thereafter, the Kingdom was ruled by collateral branches of the dynasty.

Hugh Capet, Wikipedia

With Hugh Capet the Franks abandon the tribal election of their leaders and adopt the feudal hereditary inheritance, following the Normans. While Germany was a collection of fiefdoms that elected their king, France was a kingdom that gradually absorbed all surrounding fiefdoms.

1012: The Empire Sets down the Rules

• 1012: Burchard of Worms completes his twenty-volume Decretum of Canon law.

History of the Roman Catholic Church, Wikipedia

1030: The Empire under the Sun

Early in 1030, Sergius gave Rainulf the County of Aversa as a fief, the first Norman principality in the region. Sergius also gave his sister in marriage to the new count.

Norman conquest of southern Italy, Wikipedia

1045-1058: The Empire in Formation

The eleventh century is often called the century of Saxon Popes: Pope Gregory VI (1045 - 1046), Pope Clement II (1046 - 1047), Pope Damasus II (1048), Pope Leo IX (1049 - 1054), Pope Victor II (1055 - 1057) and Pope Stephen IX (1057 - 1058).

Three popes Benedict IX, Sylvester III and Gregory VI all claimed to be the rightful pope. Henry III deposed all three and held a synod where he declared no Roman priest fit for the title of pope. He subsequently appointed Suidger of Bamberg who, after being duly acclaimed by the people and clergy, took the name Clement II.

Days later, Clement II then crowned Henry emperor. Over the next ten years, Henry personally selected four of the next five pontiffs. The ascendancy of these to the Papacy reflected the strength and power of the Holy Roman Emperor. However, Henry was the last emperor to dominate the papacy in this way because, after his death, the Pope quickly moved to change the system to prevent such secular involvement in the election of future popes.

History of the Papacy, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

The empire was built from the bottom up; when its elements reached a critical point it pushed the pope to become the supreme head of the church and Christendom, which was not acceptable to the Greek Church.

1054: The Empire is all Latin

The East-West Schism, or Great Schism, (1054) divided medieval Christendom into Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek) branches, which later became the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, respectively. Relations between Rome and the Eastern Patriarchs had long been bitter, due to political, ecclesiastical, and theological disputes. Pope Leo IX and Michael Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, heightened the conflict by suppressing Greek and Latin in their respective domains. In 1054, Roman legates traveled to Cerularius to deny him the title Oecumenical Patriarch and to insist that he recognize the Roman claim to be the head and mother of the Church. Cerularius refused. The leader of the Latin contingent excommunicated Cerularius, while he excommunicated the legates.

East-West Schism, Wikipedia

1066: The Empire Crosses the Channel

A direct consequence of the invasion was the near total elimination of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and the loss of English control over the Catholic Church in England. As William subdued rebels, he confiscated their lands and gave them to his Norman supporters. By the time of the Domesday Book, only two English landowners of any note had survived the displacement. By 1096 no church See or Bishopric was held by any native Englishman; all were held by Normans. No other medieval European conquest of Christians by Christians had such devastating consequences for the defeated ruling class.

Norman conquest of England, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

1073: The Empire Finds its Man

His life-work was based on his conviction that the Church was founded by God and entrusted with the task of embracing all mankind in a single society in which divine will is the only law; that, in her capacity as a divine institution, she is supreme over all human structures, especially the secular state; and that the pope, in his role as head of the Church, is the vice-regent of God on earth, so that disobedience to him implies disobedience to God: or, in other words, a defection from Christianity. But any attempt to interpret this in terms of action would have bound the Church to annihilate not merely a single state, but all states. Thus Gregory, as a politician wanting to achieve some result, was driven in practice to adopt a different standpoint. He acknowledged the existence of the state as a dispensation of Providence, described the coexistence of church and state as a divine ordinance, and emphasized the necessity of union between the sacerdotium and the imperium. But at no period would he have dreamed of putting the two powers on an equal footing; the superiority of church to state was to him a fact which admitted of no discussion and which he had never doubted.

He wished to see all important matters of dispute referred to Rome; appeals were to be addressed to himself; the centralization of ecclesiastical government in Rome naturally involved a curtailment of the powers of bishops. Since these refused to submit voluntarily and tried to assert their traditional independence, his papacy is full of struggles against the higher ranks of the clergy.
Pope Gregory VII, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

After a centaury of formation the empire finally achieves its goal:

These power struggles had already led to a clericalization of the Western Church under Gregory VII (1073-1085). The authority of Gregory VII and those that followed him demonstrated the secular and imperial nature of the pontifical office. With Gregory VII, we find the creation of a Christian commonwealth under papal control.

History of the Papacy, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

1086: The Empire Wounded in the West

The Battle of Sagrajas (1086 October 23), also called Zallaqa, was a battle between the Almoravid Yusuf ibn Tashfin and Castilian King Alfonso VI. The battleground was called az-Zallaqah (in English slippery ground) because the warriors were slipping all over the battle ground because of the tremendous amount of blood shed this day, and this gives rise to its name in Arabic

Sagrajas, Wikipedia

1099: The Empire Invades the East

After gaining control of Jerusalem the Crusaders created four Crusader states: the kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Tripoli. Initially, Muslims did very little about the Crusader states due to internal conflicts. Eventually, the Muslims began to reunite under the leadership of Imad al-Din Zangi. He began by re-taking Edessa in 1144. It was the first city to fall to the Crusaders, and became the first to be recaptured by the Muslims. This led the Pope to call for a second Crusade.

Crusades, Wikipedia

1128: The Empire own Soldiers

Officially endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church around 1129, the Order became a favored charity across Europe and grew rapidly in membership and power. Templar knights, in their distinctive white mantles each with a red cross, were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades.

Knights Templar, Wikipedia

With the drive of the Normans spent up-those in Sicily actually setting themselves apart from the rule of the Pope (Roger II to Manfred)-the need for organizations to replace them gave rise to the military orders.

1147-1227: The Empire Marches to the North

The official starting point for the Northern Crusades was Pope Celestine III’s call in 1193; but the already Christian kingdoms of Scandinavia and the Holy Roman Empire had started to move to subjugate their pagan neighbors even earlier. The non-Christian peoples who were objects of the campaigns at various dates included:

• the Polabian Slavs and Sorbs (by the Saxons, Danes, and Poles, beginning with the Wendish Crusade)
• the peoples of (present-day) Finland in 1154 (Finland Proper; disputed), 1249? (Tavastia) and 1293 (Karelia) (Swedish Crusades, although Christianization had started earlier),
• Estonians, Latgalians, and Livonians (by the Germans and Danes, 1193-1227),
• Lithuanians (by the Germans, unsuccessfully, early 14th century-1316),
• Curonians and Semigallians,
• Old Prussians,
• Polabian Wends and Abotrites (between the Elbe and Oder rivers).

Armed conflict between the Balts and Slavs who dwelt by the Baltic shores and their Saxon and Danish neighbors to the north and south had been common for several centuries prior to the crusade. The previous battles had largely been caused by attempts to destroy castles and sea trade routes and gain economic advantage in the region, and the crusade basically continued this pattern of conflict, albeit now inspired and prescribed by the Pope and undertaken by Papal knights and armed monks.

Northern Crusades, Wikipedia [mu emphasis]

1147: The Empire Reaches the Ocean

On the other side of the Mediterranean, however, the Second Crusade met with great success as a group of Northern European Crusaders stopped in Portugal, allied with the Portuguese, and retook Lisbon from the Muslims in 1147.

Crusades, Wikipedia

Lisbon was, later, the first port of European colonial expansion.

1150: The Empire at Zenith

Such powerful popes as Alexander III (r. 1159-81), Innocent III (r. 1198-1216), Gregory IX (r. 1227-41), and Innocent IV (r. 1243-54) wielded a primacy over the church that attempted to vindicate a jurisdictional supremacy over emperors and kings in temporal and spiritual affairs.

Papal supremacy, Wikipedia

On January 8, 1198, Lotario de’ Conti di Segni was elected Pope Innocent III. The pontificate of Innocent III is considered the height of temporal power of the papacy.

History of the Papacy, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

After reaching a peak there is only one forward: decline. As the power of the papacy declined alternative powers in the empire grew.

1189: The Empire and the Warlords

The new pope, Gregory VIII proclaimed that the capture of Jerusalem was punishment for the sins of Christians across Europe. The cry went up for a new crusade to the Holy Land. Henry II of England and Philip II of France ended their war with each other, and both imposed a “Saladin tithe” on their citizens to finance the venture. In Britain, Baldwin of Exeter, the archbishop of Canterbury, made a tour through Wales, convincing 3,000 men-at-arms to take up the cross, recorded in the Itinerary of Giraldus Cambrensis.

Third Crusade, Wikipedia

With the failure of the Second Crusade it was apparent that only regional warlords could successfully wage war. The kings of England and France and the Holy Roman Emperor were those warlords (see 1305 below).

1195: The Empire Checked in the West

The outcome of the battle shook the stability of the Kingdom of Castile for several years. All nearby castles surrendered or were abandoned: Malagón, Benavente, Calatrava, Caracuel and Torre de Guadalferza, and the way to Toledo was wide open. Fortunately for the Christians, however, Abu Yusuf Ya’qub al-Mansur moved back to Sevilla to make good his own considerable losses; there he took the title of al-Mansur Billah (’Made victorious by God’). In the battle the Castilians lost 150,000 men and 30,000 prisoners.

Battle of Alarcos, Wikipedia

1209: The Empire Crushes Separatism

When Innocent III’s diplomatic attempts to roll back Catharism met with little success and after the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau was murdered(by an agent serving the Cathar count of Toulouse), Innocent III declared a crusade against Languedoc, offering the lands of the schismatics to any French nobleman willing to take up arms. The violence led to France’s acquisition of lands with closer cultural and linguistic ties to Catalonia (see Occitan). Estimated from 200,000 to 1,000,000 people died during the crusade.

Albigensian Crusade, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

1212: The Empire Triumphant in the West

The crushing defeat of the Almohads significantly hastened their decline both in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Maghreb a decade later, this would give further momentum to the Christian Reconquest begun by the kingdoms of northern Iberia centuries before, resulting in a sharp reduction in the already declining power of the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula. Shortly after the battle, the Castilians took Baeza and then Úbeda, major fortified cities near the battlefield, and gateways to invade Andalucia. Thereafter, Ferdinand III of Castile took Córdoba in 1236, Jaén in 1246, and Seville in 1248; then he took Arcos, Medina-Sidonia, Jerez and Cádiz. After this chain of victories, only Ferdinand’s death prevented the Castilians from crossing the Gibraltar Strait to take the war to the heartland of the Almohad empire.[citation needed] Ferdinand III died in Seville on May 30, 1252, when a plague spread over the southern part of the Iberian peninsula while he was preparing his army and fleet to cross the Gibraltar Strait. On the Mediterranean coast, James I, Count of Barcelona and King of Aragon, proceeded to conquer the Balearic Islands (from 1228 over the following four years) and Valencia (the city capitulated September 28).

Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, Wikipedia

1242: The Empire Sinks in the North

The battle was a significant defeat sustained by Roman Catholic crusaders during the Northern Crusades, which were directed against pagans and Eastern Orthodox Christians rather than Muslims in the Holy Land. The crusaders’ defeat in the battle ended campaigns against the Orthodox Novgorod Republic and other Russian territories for the next century.

Battle of the Ice, Wikipedia

1282: The Empire in Turmoil

The War of the (Sicilian) Vespers started with the insurrection of the Sicilian Vespers against Charles of Anjou in 1282 and finally ended with the peace of Caltabellotta in 1302. It was fought in Sicily, Catalonia (the Aragonese Crusade) and elsewhere in the western Mediterranean between, on the one side, the Angevin claimants Charles of Anjou and his son, Charles II and the kings of France, their relatives, backed by the Papacy and, on the other side, the kings of Aragon.

War of the Sicilian Vespers, Wikipedia

The Aragonese Crusade or Crusade of Aragón, a part of the larger War of the Sicilian Vespers, was declared by Pope Martin IV against the King of Aragón, Peter III the Great, in 1284 and 1285. Because of the recent conquest of Sicily by Peter, the Pope declared a crusade against him and officially deposed him as king, on the grounds that Sicily was a papal fief: Peter’s grandfather and namesake, Peter II, had surrendered the kingdom as a fief to the Holy See. Martin bestowed it on Charles, Count of Valois, son of the French king, Philip III, and nephew of Peter III.
The conflict quickly became a kind of civil war, as Peter’s brother, King James II of Majorca, joined the French. James had also inherited the County of Roussillon and thus stood between the dominions of the French and Aragonese monarchs. Peter had opposed James’ inheritance as a younger son and reaped the consequence of such rivalry in the crusade.

Aragonese Crusade, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

Crusades are launched against Christians while the East is lost, this is the clearly a century of decline.

1291: The Empire Loses the East

The Mamluks eventually made good their pledge to cleanse the entire Middle East of the Franks. With the fall of Antioch (1268), Tripoli (1289), and Acre (1291), those Christians unable to leave the cities were massacred or enslaved and the last traces of Christian rule in the Levant disappeared

Crusades, Wikipedia

1305: The Empire in Captivity

The Papacy in the Late Middle Ages had a major temporal role in addition to its spiritual role. The conflict between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor basically boiled down to a dispute over which of them was the leader of Christendom in secular matters. In the early 14th century, the papacy was well past the prime of its secular rule - its peak of importance had passed in the 12th and 13th centuries. The success of the early crusades added greatly to the prestige of the Popes as secular leaders of Christendom, with monarchs like the Kings of England, France, and even the Emperor merely acting as Marshals for the popes, and leading “their” armies. One exception to this was Frederick II, who was twice excommunicated by the Pope during one crusade. Frederick II ignored this and was rather successful in the Holy Land.
Beginning with Clement V, elected 1305, all popes during the residence of the papacy in Avignon were French. However, this simple fact tends to overestimate this influence. Southern France at that time had a quite independent culture from Northern France, where most of the advisers to the King of France came from. Arles was at that time still independent, formally a part of the Holy Roman Empire. The literature produced by the “troubadour” age in the Languedoc area, is unique and strongly distinguishes its culture from that of the Royal circles in the north. Even in terms of religion, the South produced its own variant, the Cathar movement, which was ultimately declared heretical, as it clashed with doctrines of the Church. But this merely demonstrated a strong sense of independence in Southern France. However, all of this had been rendered helpless during the Albigensian Crusade, a hundred years before. By the time of Avignon, the power of the French King in this region was uncontested, although legally still not yet binding.

Avignon Papacy, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

A strong regional warlord takes the emperor into his protection and removes him from the capital into his own region, a very common occurrence in the history of empires; the Avignon Papacy is just the same.

1307: The Empire Disarmed

On Friday 1307 October 13 Philip ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The Templars were charged with numerous heresies and tortured to extract false confessions of blasphemy. The confessions, despite having been obtained under duress, caused a scandal in Paris. After more bullying from Philip, Pope Clement then issued the bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae on November 22, 1307, which instructed all Christian monarchs in Europe to arrest all Templars and seize their assets.
Pope Clement called for papal hearings to determine the Templars’ guilt or innocence, and once freed of the Inquisitors’ torture, many Templars recanted their confessions. Some had sufficient legal experience to defend themselves in the trials, but in 1310 Philip blocked this attempt, using the previously forced confessions to have dozens of Templars burned at the stake in Paris

Knights Templar, Wikipedia

With the emperor under the protection of the warlord there is no need for independent military powers.

1315: The Empire Hungry

The Great Famine of 1315-1317 (occasionally dated 1315-1322) was the first of a series of large-scale crises that struck Europe early in the 14th century, causing millions of deaths over an extended number of years and marking a clear end to an earlier period of growth and prosperity during the 11th through 13th centuries. Starting with bad weather in the spring of 1315, universal crop failures lasted through 1316 until the summer of 1317; Europe did not fully recover until 1322. It was a period marked by extreme levels of criminal activity, disease and mass death, infanticide, and cannibalism. It had consequences for Church, State, European society and future calamities to follow in the 14th century.

Great Famine of 1315-1317, Wikipedia [my emphasis]

1337: The Empire in Civil War

The war was in fact a series of conflicts and is commonly divided into three or four phases: the Edwardian War (1337-1360), the Caroline War (1369-1389), the Lancastrian War (1415-1429), and the slow decline of English fortunes after the appearance of Joan of Arc (1412-1431). Several other contemporary European conflicts were directly related to the conflict between England and France: the Breton War of Succession, the Castilian Civil War, and the War of the Two Peters.

Hundred Years’ War, Wikipedia

1348: The Empire Sick

Figures for the death toll vary widely by area and from source to source as new research and discoveries come to light. It killed an estimated 75-200 million people in the 14th century. According to medieval historian Philip Daileader in 2007:

The trend of recent research is pointing to a figure more like 45% to 50% of the European population dying during a four-year period. There is a fair amount of geographic variation. In Mediterranean Europe and Italy, the South of France and Spain, where plague ran for about four years consecutively, it was probably closer to 80% to 75% of the population. In Germany and England . . . it was probably closer to 20%.

Black Death, Wikipedia