The Monasteries of the Thirty Years War

The Church helped stand up the power of Europe's military aristocracy, but also competed for power with it. Not only did the Pope control the papal states around Rome as a direct feudal ruler, the Church coexisted uneasily alongside dynastic rulers in places like France and England. The intertwined secular and social power of the Church only exacerbated the tension between embodying a faith that posited universal peace brought about by universal love and administering the rule of warmongering aristocrats.