A History of the Medieval Church

590-1500

Margaret Deanesly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134955329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A classic history of the church from the accession of Gregory the Great to the Reformation.

CHAPTER I GREGORY THE GREAT, 590–604

Gregory’s youth, monastic profession and election as pope—Gregory, the empire, and the Lombards—His administration of the papal patrimony —His correspondence with bishops and patriarchs—His writings

There is much to be said for beginning a study of medieval church history with the pontificate of pope Gregory the Great (590–604). The great oecumenical councils were past, and with them one mode of expressing the will of catholic Christendom, both eastern and western. Since 476 there had been no emperor residing in the west, and the way was open for the extension of papal power in Italy. There a new race of barbarians had appeared, and it fell to the papacy to struggle with these new invaders, “fierce with more than the usual fierceness of the Germans,” and finally to arrange terms of peace for the partition of Italy between these Lombards and the Roman empire. The peace once made, and it was arranged by Gregory the Great himself, the papacy was left in a position of political advantage, able to play off the Lombards against the emperor at Constantinople. Had the seat of empire remained at Rome, or had Constantinople become permanently the real capital of Europe, the fortunes of the papacy as a temporal power must have been different. Gregory the Great not only ruled in Rome for fourteen years when these issues were being shaped: he took a large part in shaping them. By his influence on the Lombard settlement, and no less by his influence on the administration, missions and doctrines of the church, as by his protection of nascent Benedictine monachism, Gregory stands out as the greatest statesman of the early medieval church.

Gregory himself was born in Rome about the year 540. The Rome of his boyhood was a beggared Rome, wasted by the Gothic wars. Only a handful of officials inhabited the civil offices on the Palatine mount. Pagan shrines and temples were disused and ruinous, and not as yet, for the most part, taken over and reconsecrated as Christian churches. Five great basilicas (the contemporary word for church) shared the reverence of the Chrlstian population, and the two last of the “seven churches of Rome” were already growing in veneration. The mother church of Rome, the site of the pope’s chair or “cathedra,” was the basilica of S.John on the Lateran; close by was the papal residence, the Lateran palace. The basilicas of S.Peter and S.Paul respectively were built on the traditional sites of their martyrdom, S.Peter’s on the Vatican, and S.Paul’s on the road to Ostia. The basilica on the Esquiline, S.Maria Maggiore, surpassed in size the comparatively small church on the Lateran; the fifth basilica was dedicated to S.Lawrence, the sixth to S.Sebastian, and the seventh to S.Cross in Jerusalem. Of these seven churches, one was thus dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, one to the cross whose “invention” by Helena in Jerusalem sent a wave of veneration to the remotest parts of Europe, and four were erected over the graves of the martyrs, and hallowed by their relics. This close association of the living Christian with the dead, the living worshipper with the prayers and protection of the martyr, before whose “sacred pledges” lamps burned continually, was common to Christendom, and determined the architectural form of Christian churches for centuries. To the Christian of the sixth century, as earlier, there was no spot more hallowed than these “martyria,” and the churches erected over them: and the dust of the apostle who had seen with his own eyes and touched with his hands the very body of the Saviour was in itself a link with Christ, inexpressibly precious.

Gregory’s father and mother were a devout and wealthy couple of senatorial rank. His youth was spent at his father’s house on the Caelian, opposite the deserted palaces of the Palatine. Of the old classical education, which Martianus Capella had just summarised in his treatise on the seven liberal arts, Gregory received instruction in the first three subjects, with some knowledge of Latin literature, the slight contemporary infusion of Porphyry’s logic, or dialectic, and a considerable knowledge of rhetoric. Of the four remaining liberal arts, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, he seems like his contemporaries to have known little or nothing.

While Gregory passed into the lower grades of the imperial civil service, the Lombard conquerors were passing down into north Italy. By 571 they had conquered the valley of the Po; the next year they seized Benevento and Spoleto; in 573 Rome itself was in danger. In this year we find Gregory prefect of the city, the highest civil dignitary in Rome. His duties included the nominal presidency of the senate: supreme civil jurisdiction within 100 miles of the capital: the provision of grain supplies: the care of aqueducts, sewers, and the bed of the Tiber: the leadership of such officials ar remained in Rome, and a large financial authority. Gregory’s early connexion with and training in administrative work is of importance. Through his father he must have been in touch with the administrative side of church work, and he himself obtained the highest administrative office in the imperial government. Just as the spirit of classical literature was passed on chiefly through the mind and writings of Augustine to the medieval world: so the Roman genius for administration and “government” became the heritage of the medieval church chiefly through Gregory the Great. Gregory might well have looked upon the exarchate at Ravenna as the next stage in his career; but he chose rather to exchange his worldly chances for the life of Christian perfection.

In 574 Gregory sold his patrimony in Sicily, and founded six monasteries there. He then bestowed the remainder of his patrimony upon the poor, keeping the paternal house on the Caelian as a monastery for himself and the brothers he collected there, and dedicated it to S.Andrew. S.Benedict had founded his monastery at Monte Cassino, and died about forty years earlier, and Gregory can hardly have been ignorant of his reputation. But there is no evidence that his new monastery on the Caelian adopted the Benedictine rule or that he was acquainted with the rule before he became a monk. S.Benedict legislated for a house, not an order, and there is, in fact, no evidence that any house explicitly adopted his rule for its sole guide for a hundred years or more after his death. Gregory was later to be a great patron of monks, and the chief champion of their rights as against unprincipled or greedy diocesans. The monastic life attracted him, as he wrote in one of his later letters, as an opportunity for a life of detachment, prayer, or contemplation. “I remember with sorrow what I once was in the monastery: how I rose in contemplation above all changeable and decaying things, and thought of nothing but things of heaven: how my soul, though pent within the body, soared beyond its fleshly prison, and looked with longing upon death itself as the means of entering into life…. And when I recall the condition of my former life, I sigh as one who looks back and gazes on the shore he has left behind.”

For four years Gregory was left to learn the life which was to affect medieval Europe so profoundly; but in 578 the pope, wishing to raise him ultimately to high office in the church, took him from the monastery, and ordained him “seventh” deacon. In the spring of the year following, 579, pope Pelagius sent him as his secretary to Constantinople. The Lombards were ravaging Italy, the exarch at Ravenna did nothing in her defence: “the district of Rome,” Pelagius wrote, “is more than ever unguarded.” It was Gregory’s paramount duty to prevail upon the emperor to send help, money, or above all troops to Italy, but he had little success. Though Gregory lived in a palace, he did not give up his monastic habit of life: “for many of his brothers from the monastery followed him, led by brotherly love,” and the seclusion in which he lived with them probably accounts for the fact that during his stay in Constantinople he learned no Greek. The court of the emperor was still Latin speaking, and Latin was still in the east the language of public life.

On his return to Rome Gregory was again papal deacon and immersed in business from 586 till 590. Among his monks whom he mentions in his letters were four who, like himself, were to be taken from the monastery and made bishops: Maximianus, whom Gregory made archbishop of Syracuse; Marinianus, who was elected bishop of Ravenna; Sabinus, bishop of Gallipoli, and Augustine, the first metropolitan of Canterbury. During these years Gregory reedited the lectures on the book of Job, which he had given to his monks in Constantinople, as the Magna Moralia, which later scholars were to find a mine of miscellaneous theology in the form of a commentary; was in close touch with pope Pelagius; and even desired to start on that mission to the heathen Angles which he had contemplated since the sight of the Anglian boys in the slave market had filled him with pity.

To the perennial fears of the Lombards from which Rome suffered were added in 590 the horrors of bubonic plague. Pope Pelagius himself died in February, and the clergy and people of Rome immediately elected Gregory pope. During the summer, while the imperial confirmation was awaited from Constantinople, the plague raged in Romé. In April Gregory organised a sevenfold penitential procession, to march to the basilica of S. Maria Maggiore, and implore deliverance from the plague. As the procession of penitents crossed the bridge of Hadrian, a later legend tells of their vision of the archangel Michael in the sky over the mausoleum of Hadrian: he was restoring his sword, the sword of pestilence, to its scabbard. The plague was stayed, and the mausoleum became for medieval Rome the castle of Sant’ Angelo. The confirmation of the papal election arrived in the autumn, and on 3 September Gregory was hurriedly consecrated in the basilica of S.Peter.

For fourteen years, from September 590 till March 604, Gregory ruled as apostolic bishop of Rome, and the effective protector of the civil population of central Italy from the “unspeakable Lombards.” If there is any leading motive in his reign, any phrase that sums up his character, it is his insistence that all should live in expectation of the “terrible judgement” which the New Testament, and the world catastrophes of the day, made him believe imminent. He passed all his pontificate “among the swords of the Lombards,” never sure but that some combination of Lombard dukes and king might reduce the sacred city itself to a wilderness, sometimes with their forces actually at the gates; he had seen from the wall Christians tied by the necks like dogs, and led away to be sold as slaves in Gaul; his ears were filled with the oppressions of the wretched peasants of the Campagna, starving refugees in Rome clamoured for shelter and food. To a noble who asked his influence with the emperor he wrote: “Why, my noble son, do you not reflect that the world is near at end? Day by day all things are driven onward, and we are brought nearer to the trial we shall have to endure before the eternal, the terrible Judge. What then ought we to think of but His coming? Our life is like a voyage: the voyager may stand or sit or lie, but all the time he is going on as the ship may bear him. So also are we: sleeping or waking, silent or talking, still or in movement, willing or unwilling, every day, every moment, we draw near the end.” Filled with conviction of the shortness of the time, the imminence of the Judge, Gregory wore himself out in labours.

His pontificate is notable above all for its enhancement of the prestige of the apostolic see in Christendom, to which his passion for righteousness and ordered peace tended even more strongly than his zeal for the honour of the chair of S.Peter. His influence on the prestige of the apostolic see was fivefold. The papacy took over, under him, certain functions of the civil government which had earlier been performed by the officials of the emperor; the policy of balance was begun between the Lombards and Constantinople; the administration of the papal patrimony, and the whole apostolic see, profited from his civil experience; the churches of the west were brought more closely into touch with Rome than for a hundred years earlier or later; and the traditional claims of Rome were upheld against Constantinople.

When Gregory became pope imperial Italy consisted of three regions, each grouped round an important city. The centre of the northern region was Ravenna, the residence of the exarch; the centre of the middle region was Rome; the centre of the southern the city of Naples. The “patrimony of S.Peter” was not, however, coextensive with these regions. It included estates round Rome, especially to the south, in the Campagna; large estates in the toe and heel of Italy— Lucania and Apulia; important grain bearing lands in Sicily; and less important groups of estates in Gaul, Illyricum and the Mediterranean islands. In virtue of these estates the Roman church was the richest landowner in Italy, and the largest taxpayer to the imperial treasury: it was thus natural that when the Lombard invasions broke up the imperial administration, and in particular, interrupted communications between Ravenna and Rome, the officials of the patrimony should have been charged with, or spontaneously assumed, the duties of imperial officials. The feeding of the large majority of the citizens by the imperial corn distributions devolved upon the pope, and was only maintained by large contributions from the papal patrimony. The land-tax was henceforward collected by officials of the patrimony. Gregory, moreover, interfered with secular officials to prevent oppression of the peasantry: “if your piety were to remain unaware,” he once wrote to the empress, “of what is being done in these provinces, I should be punished by the severe Judge for my sin of silence.”

Gregory’s treatment of the Lombard problem redounded to the prestige of the papacy later, though not to his good relations with the emperor Maurice at the time. The Arian Lombards were, fortunately for Rome, not united: they ruled from three main centres. The valley of the Po was ruled from Pavia, from 590 by king Agilulf and queen Theudelinda: this group was the most menacing to the exarch at Ravenna. But from 591 two Lombard leaders became dukes of Spoleto and Benevento respectively. The duchy of Spoleto threatened the communications between Rome and Ravenna, and was a most dangerous neighbour to Rome. The duchy of Benevento, to the south, was a more immediate threat to Naples. For the provincials themselves, and for the pope, the pressing need was for the ending of the horrors of war, by ceding to the Lombards some such position as had been held by the Ostrogoths. To the exarch, safe amid his marshes, and not particularly moved by the miseries of the provincials, it seemed good above all things to play for time, without recognising the Lombard status by an imperial peace. In time, lessened stress at Constantinople might allow troops to be sent to help him: or the divisions of the Lombards might prove their own undoing. In face of the supineness of the exarch Gregory undertook the defence of central Italy. In the stress of an invasion, he appointed a military governer to Nepi, thirty miles north of Rome, and in 592 he arranged a peace with the duke of Spoleto. This was disregarded by the exarch, and king Agilulf in consequence marched to take Rome, possibly to make it his capital. But Gregory, interrupting his sermons on the prophet Ezekiel, inspired the defence, and at the end of the summer the Lombards retired. In 595 Gregory arranged a peace with Agilulf which provoked the wrath of the emperor; but the peace stood, and henceforth the pope was a greater personage in Lombard politics than the exarch.

The prestige of the apostolic see was increased, again, by Gregory’s administration of the revenue of the church. The question of the organisation of the Roman see is of great interest, as, since it was immensely richer and more advanced than all other sees in the west, it served to some extent as a model. Papal letters of advice often mentioned the custom of the apostolic see; Frankish councils are found adopting a practice spontaneously “because it was the usual custom throughout all Italy.” The patrimony of S.Peter has at this time been computed at from 1300–1800 square miles. Each local patrimony was subdivided into large groups of estates which were further subdivided into separate farms. Each patrimony was under a papal agent, the rector. Under him came a set of officials called defensors: beneath the defensors came the “actionarii,” beneath them the conductors or farmers, who leased the farms and collected the rents, in money or in kind, from the “coloni” or “rustici.” The church possessed slaves, like lay landowners: some did farm work, some were craftsmen or personal servants. The rectors and defensors of the patrimonies had before Gregory’s reign been ecclesiastics: the actionarii and the conductors had been laymen. Gregory required the actionarii also to be ecclesiastics in minor orders: and it was in the case of the Sicilian actionarii that he first allowed the tonsure to be given separately from a minor order—a practice of great importance to European civilisation later, (see Chapter II). Gregory was in constant touch with the officials of the patrimonies, forced upon them in several cases mitigation of custom in favour of the peasant, and impressed upon them diligence and righteous dealing.

Not only the collection of the revenue, but its distribution was the subject of his anxious thought. He was bound, first of all, to provide for the stipends of the apostolic see. He must provide for all the clergy, and officials of the patrimony whom the church supported: except for those priests (presbyters) attached to some of the basilicas within the city of Rome which had separate endowments. Beyond this he was particularly bound to afford alms to ecclesiastics in distress, and such diocesan churches as had been almost entirely denuded of their clergy and population by the Lombards. Beyond this again, he must arrange for the feeding of the poor, the destitute population dependent on corn and food doles. Of Gregory’s payments to his clergy John the Deacon tells us: “He turned into money the revenues of all the patrimonies [an exaggeration, as appears from Gregory’s letters] according to the ledger of [pope] Gelasius, of whom he seems to have been a most faithful follower; and having collected all the orders of the church [i.e., the clerical militia, see Chapter II], either from the palace, or the monasteries, or the churches, or the cemeteries, or the deaconries, or the urban or suburban xenodochia, he distributed to all their pensions, in silver or in gold, four times a year, according as the ledger of Gelasius indicated.” In addition to this, early on Easter morning, sitting in the basilica of pope Vigilius, Gregory distributed a golden pound to all bishops, presbyters, and deacons. General relief was variously administered. At each of the seven deaconries (not merely offices, but buildings at this date), food was given to the starving on application; the xenodochia sheltered the infirm, the sick, and strangers, monthly distributions were made to the poor of that part of the revenue of the patrimony still collected in kind (wine, cheese, vegetables, bacon, fish and oil), “thus the church came to be regarded as a source of supply for the whole community:” special alms were given to monasteries; and in the papal palace strangers were entertained, and food cooked to be borne by special officials to the sick. So keen was Gregory’s sense of his responsibility for the poor, that he held himself guilty and refused to say mass for some days when a certain pauper had been found dead without help in the back room of a common lodging-house; and John the Deacon tells us that a large volume existed in his day, containing the names of all the recipients of Gregory’s bounty, not only in Rome and the suburbs, but even in distant coast towns.

Over the churches within the old canonical patriarchate in Italy Gregory exercised constant supervision, writing directly to bishops, receiving appeals at Rome, and using the officials of the patrimony to a certain extent as his agents for the supervision of the local clergy. Italy was divided up into a vast number of little dioceses, many of them only a few miles in extent: “every town of any size, and many that were little better than villages possessed a bishop.” In Italy church organisation has crystallised early, at a stage when each local group of Christians had its own bishop, who alone baptised, celebrated the mysteries, and reconciled after penance. The Sicilian dioceses were relatively much larger. Gregory in his letters is seen providing for dioceses destitute of clergy; joining one see to another; allowing the moving of a see from the plain to a hill town, for purposes of defence; remonstrating with neglectful bishops for failing to convert the pagan and with those who would not pay to their clergy the full canonical fourth (see page 34) of their revenue; and showing extraordinary pains and patience to procure the more decent behaviour of illiterate old ruffians like the archbishop of Sardinia, who, (Gregory heard), ploughed up his neighbour’s corn fields before mass, celebrated mass himself, and then proceeded to remove his neighbour’s boundary stones.

Outside the old canonical patriarchate Gregory corresponded with the bishops of Spain, Africa, Milan, Ravenna, Istria, Dalmatia and Illyricum. He heard with joy of the conversion of king Reccared of Spain from Arianism in 589, and sent a pallium to Leander of Seville; in Africa he wrote urging the bishops to suppress the Donatist heresy; he prevented the election of a Lombard, and probably Arian, bishop to the great metropolitan see of Milan, and to his joy, the child of Theudelinda and Agilulf received orthodox baptism in 602. With the bishops of Ravenna he had a protracted dispute over the wearing of the pallium. This vestment of white wool, draped over the shoulders, was originally that of an imperial official, and it was worn in the east in the sixth century by all bishops indiscriminately. In the west it was worn of right only by the pope and two other bishops, one of whom was the bishop of Ravenna; the pope in addition conferred it as a mark of honour on metropolitans, and even certain simple bishops. The bishop of Ravenna’s right to wear the pall was not challenged by Gregory, but only his custom of wearing it, not only during mass, but before, when he gave audience to the laity, and when he went in solemn processions. Although Gregory was gratified by the election of his own monk Marinianus as bishop of Ravenna in the midst of the dispute, he found to his surprise that the latter continued to defend the rights of the church of Ravenna in the matter, with the support of the exarch. The matter was finally allowed to drop. With the churches of Istria, Dalmatia and Illyricum Gregory was also in correspondence, for the eradication of simony and heresy.

Gregory’s own view that the holder of the apostolic see was something far more than patriarch of the west is illustrated by his relations with the churches of the east, and particularly with the patriarch of Constantinople. To Gregory the apostolic see was “the chief of all the churches, whose bishop was responsible for the government of the whole church,” at least by the duty of correcting transgressors. The Roman bishop was vested with this preeminence as the successor and vicar of S.Peter. All bishops and patriarchs could be corrected by the pope, if guilty of heresy or offence against the canons. The decrees of councils had no force “without the authority and consent of the aposto...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• PREFACE TO THE 1969 REPRINT
• INTRODUCTION FROM THE COUNCIL OF CHALCEDON TO GREGORY THE GREAT, 451–590
• CHAPTER I GREGORY THE GREAT, 590–604
• CHAPTER II THE SECULAR AND MONASTIC CLERGY, 600–750
• CHAPTER III THE MISSIONARIES: AUGUSTINE, AIDAN, WILLIBRORD, BONIFACE
• CHAPTER IV THE CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE AND THE CHURCH
• CHAPTER V RELATIONS OF EASTERN AND WESTERN CHURCHES TILL 1054
• CHAPTER VI THE GROWTH OF PAPAL POWER, 604–1073
• CHAPTER VII CLUNY: HILDEBRAND: INVESTITURES
• CHAPTER VIII THE CRUSADES AND THEIR EFFECT ON THE CHURCH
• CHAPTER IX TWELFTH CENTURY MONASTICISM: CISTERCIANS: CARTHUSIANS: AUSTIN CANONS
• CHAPTER X THE TWELFTH CENTURY RENAISSANCE: CANON LAW
• CHAPTER XI INNOCENT III
• CHAPTER XII THE FRIARS
• CHAPTER XIII THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY: S.THOMAS AQUINAS
• CHAPTER XIV THE AVIGNON POPES: THE CURIA: AND THE SCHISM
• CHAPTER XV THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY DIOCESE AND PARISH IN ENGLAND
• CHAPTER XVI SCHOOLS: HOSPITALS: ANCHORAGES
• CHAPTER XVII MEDIEVAL HERESY AND THE INQUISITION
• CHAPTER XVIII THE CONCILIAR MOVEMENT
• CHAPTER XIX THE RENAISSANCE
• APPENDIX WESTERN MONASTICISM BEFORE CHARLEMAGNE
• SELECT BOOK LIST: [THE ORFER IS ROUGHLY CHRONOLOGICAL]
• LEADING EVENTS, 451–1500
• POPES, 440–1503: (Most of the antipopes are omitted)
• EMPERORS AND KINGS OF THE ROMANS
• ARCHBISHOPS OF CANTERBURY