The History of the Christian Church

This 58th Episode of CS is titled – Monk Business Part 1 and is the first of several episodes in which we’ll take a look at monastic movements in Church History.I realize that may not sound terribly exciting to some. The prospect of digging into this part of the story didn’t hold much interest for me either, until I realized how rich it is. You see, being a bit of a fan for the work of J. Edwin Orr, I love the history of revival. Well, it turns out each new monastic movement was often a fresh move of God’s Spirit in renewal. Several were a new wineskin for God’s work.The roots of monasticism are worth taking some time to unpack. Let’s get started . . .Leisure time to converse about philosophy with friends was prized in the ancient world. Even if someone didn’t have the intellectual chops to wax eloquent on philosophy, it was still fashionable to express a yearning for such intellectual leisure, or “otium” as it was  called; but of course, they were much too busy serving their fellow man. It was the ancient version of, “I just don’t have any ‘Me-time’.”Sometimes, as the famous Roman orator Cicero, the ancients did score the time for such reflection and enlightened discussion and retired to write on themes such as duty, friendship, and old age. That towering intellect and theologian, Augustine of Hippo had the same wish as a young man, and when he became a Christian in 386, left his professorship in oratory to devote his life to contemplation and writing. He retreated with a group of friends, his son and his mother, to a home on Lake Como, to discuss, then write about The Happy Life, Order and other such subjects, in which both classical philosophy and Christianity shared an interest. When he returned to his hometown in North Africa, he set up a community in which he and his friends could lead a monastic life, apart from the world, studying scripture and praying. Augustine’s contemporary, Jerome; translator of the Latin Bible known as the Vulgate, felt the same tug, and he, too, made a series of attempts to live apart from the world so he could give himself to philosophical reflection.Ah; the Good Life!This sense of a divine ‘call’ to a Christian version of this life of ‘philosophical retirement’ had an important difference from the older, pagan version. While reading and meditation remained central, the call to do it in concert with others who also set themselves apart from the world both spiritually and physically was added to the mix.For the monks and nuns who sought such a communal life, the crucial thing was the call to a way of life which would make it possible to ‘go apart’ and spend time with God in prayer and worship. Prayer was the opus dei, the ‘work of God’.As it was originally conceived, to become a monk or nun was to attempt to obey to the full the commandment to love God with all one is and has. In the Middle Ages, it was also understood to be a fulfillment of the command to love one’s neighbor, for monks and nuns prayed for the world. They really believed prayer was an important task on behalf of a morally and spiritually needy world of lost souls. So among the members of a monastery, there were those who prayed, those who ruled, and those who worked. The most important to society, were those who prayed.A difference developed between the monastic movements in the East and West. In the East, the Desert Fathers set the pattern. They were hermits who adopted extreme forms of piety and asceticism. They were regarded as powerhouses of spiritual influence; authorities who could assist ordinary people with their problems. The Stylites, for example, lived on high platforms; sitting atop poles, and were an object of reverence to those who came to ask advice. Others, shut off from the world in caves or huts, sought to deny themselves any contact with the temptations of ‘the world’, especially women. There was in this an obvious preoccupation with the dangers of the flesh, which was partly a legacy of the Greek dualists’ conviction that matter and the physical world were unredeemably  evil.I pause to make a personal, pastoral observation. So warning! – Blatant opinion follows.You can’t read the NT without seeing the call to holiness in the Christian Life. But that holiness is a work of God’s grace as the Holy Spirit empowers the believer to live a life pleasing to God. NT holiness is a joyous privilege, not a heavy burden and duty. NT holiness enhances life, never diminishes it.This is what Jesus modeled so well; and it’s why genuine seekers after God were drawn to him. He was attractive. He didn’t just do holiness, He WAS Holy. Yet no one had more life. And everywhere He went, dead things came to life!As Jesus’ followers, we’re supposed to be holy in the same way. But if we’re honest, we’d have to admit that for the vast majority, holiness is conceived as a dry, boring, life-sucking burden of moral perfection.Real holiness isn’t religious rule-keeping. It isn’t a list of moral proscriptions; a set of “Don’t’s! Or I will smite thee with Divine Wrath and cast thy wretched soul into the eternal flames!”NT holiness is a mark of Real Life, the one Jesus rose again to give us. It’s Jesus living in and thru us.The Desert Fathers and hermits who followed their example were heavily influenced by the dualist Greek worldview that all matter was evil and only the spirit was good. Holiness meant an attempt to avoid any shred of physical pleasure while retreating into the life of the mind. This thinking was the major force influencing the monastic movement as it moved both East and West. But in the East, the monks were hermits who pursued their lifestyles in isolation while in the West, they tended to pursue them in concert and communal life.As we go on we’ll see that some monastic leaders realized casting holiness as a negative denial of the flesh rather than a positive embracing of the love and truth of Christ was an error they sought to reform.In the East, while monks might live in a group, they didn’t seek for community. They didn’t converse or work together in a common cause. They simply shared cells next to one another. And each followed his own schedule. Their only real contact was that they ate together and might pray together. This tradition continues to this day on Mount Athos in northern Greece, where monks live in solitude and prayer in cells high on the cliffs, food lowered to them in baskets.A crucial development in Western monasticism took place in the 6th C, when Benedict of Nursia withdrew with a group of friends to live an ascetic life. This prompted him to give serious thought to the way in which the ‘religious life’ should be organized. Benedict arranged for groups of 12 monks to live together in small communities. Then he moved to Monte Cassino where, in 529, he set up the monastery which was to become the mother house of the Benedictine Order. The rule of life he drew up there was a synthesis of elements in existing rules for monastic life. From this point on, the Rule of St Benedict set the standard for living the religious life until the 12th C.The Rule achieved a good working balance between the body and soul. It aimed at moderation and order. It said that those who went apart from the world to live lives dedicated to God should not subject themselves to extreme asceticism. They should live in poverty and chastity, and in obedience to their abbot, but they shouldn’t feel the need to brutalize their flesh with things like scourges and hair-shirts. They should eat moderately but not starve. They should balance their time in a regular and orderly way between manual work, reading and prayer—their real work for God. There were to be seven regular acts of worship in the day, known as ‘hours’, attended by the entire community. In Benedict’s vision, the monastic yoke was to be sweet; the burden light. The monastery was a ‘school’ of the Lord’s service, in which the baptized soul made progress in the Christian life.In the Anglo-Saxon period of English history, nuns formed a significant part of the population. There were several ‘double monasteries’, where communities of monks and nuns lived side by side. Several female abbots, called ‘abbesses’ proved to be outstanding leaders. Hilda, the Abbess of the double monastery at Whitby played a major role at the Synod of Whitby in 664.A common feature of monastic life in the West was that it was largely reserved for the upper classes. Serfs generally didn’t have the freedom to become monks. The houses of monks and nuns were the recipients of noble and royal patronage, usually because the nobility thought by supporting such a holy endeavor, they promoted their spiritual case with God.  Remember as well that while the first-born son stood to inherit everything, later sons were a potential cause of unrest if they decided to vie with their elder brother in gaining the birthright. So these ‘spare’ children of good birth were often given to monastic communes by their families. They were then charged with carrying the religious duty for the entire family. They were a kind of “spiritual surrogate” whose task was to produce a surplus of godliness the rest of the family could draw from. Rich and powerful families gave monasteries, lands and estates, for the good of the souls of their members. Rulers and soldiers were too busy to attend to their spiritual lives,  so ‘professionals’ drawn from their own families could help them by doing it on their behalf.A consequence of this was that, in the late Middle Ages, the abbot or abbess was usually a nobleman or woman. She/He was often chosen because of being the highest in birth in the monastery or convent, and not because of any natural powers of leadership or outstanding spirituality. Chaucer’s cruel 14th C caricature of a prioress depicts a woman who would have been much more at home in a country house playing with her pet dogs.In these features of noble patronage of the religious life lay not only the stamp of society’s approval, but also the potential for decay. Monastic houses that became rich and were filled with those who’d not chosen to enter the religious life, but had been put there in childhood, often became decadent. The Cluniac reforms of the 10th C were a consequence of the recognition that there would need to be a tightening of the ship if the Benedictine order was not to be lost altogether. In the commune at Cluny and the houses which imitated it, standards were high, although here, too, there was a danger of distortion of the original Benedictine vision. Cluniac houses had extra rules and a degree of rigidity which compromised the original simplicity of Benedictine life.At the end of the 11th C, several developments radically altered the range of choice for those in the West who wanted to enter a monastery. The first was a change of fashion, which encouraged married couples of mature years to decide to end their days as a monk or nun. A knight who’d fought his wars might make an agreement with his wife that they would go off into separate religious houses. Adult entry of this sort was by those who really did want to be there, and it had the potential to alter the balance in favor of serious commitment.But these mature adults weren’t the only one’s entering monasteries. It became fashionable for younger people to head off to a monastery where education had become top-rank. Then monasteries began to specialize in various pursuits. It was a time of experimentation.Out of this period of experiment came one immensely important new order, the Cistercians. They used the Benedictine rule, but had a different set of priorities. The first was a determination to protect themselves from the dangers which could come from growing too rich.“Too rich?” you might ask. “How’s that possible if they’d taken a vow of poverty?”Ah à There’s the rub.Yes; monks and nuns vowed poverty, but their lifestyle included diligence in work. And some brilliant minds had joined the monasteries, so they’d devised ingenious methods for going about their work in a more productive manner, enhancing yields of crops and products. Being deft businessmen, they worked good deals and maximized profits, which went in to the monastery’s account. But individual monks, of course, didn’t profit thereby. The funds were used to expand the monastery’s resources and facilities. This led to even higher profits. Which were then used in plushing up the monastery itself. The monks’ cells got nicer, the food better, the grounds more sumptuous, the library more expansive.  The monks got new outfits. Outwardly things technically were the same, they owned nothing personally, but in fact, their monastic world was upgraded significantly.The Cistercians responded to this by building houses in remote places and keeping them as simple, bare lodgings. They also made a place for people from the lower social classes who had vocations but wanted to give themselves more completely to God for a period of time. These were called “lay brothers.”The rather startling early success of the Cistercians was due to Bernard of Clairvaux. When he decided to enter a newly founded Cistercian monastery, he took with him a group of friends and relatives. Because of his oratory skill and praise for the Cistercian model, recruitment proceed so rapidly many more houses had to be founded in quick succession. He was made abbot of one of them at Clairvaux, from which he draws his name. He went on to become a leading figure in the monastic world and in politics. He spoke so well and so movingly that he was useful as a diplomatic emissary, as well as a preacher. You may remember he was one of the premier reasons the Crusades were able to rally so many to their campaign.Other monastic experiments weren’t so successful. The willingness to try new forms of the monastic life gave a platform for some short-lived endeavors by the eccentric. There are always those who think their idea is THE way it ought to be done. Either because they lack common sense or have no skill at recruiting, they fall apart. So many were engaged in pushing forward the boundaries of monastic life one writer thought it would be helpful to review the available modes in the 12th C. His work covered all the possibilities, from the Benedictines and reformed Benedictines, to priests who didn’t live enclosed lives, but who were allowed to work in the world—and the various sorts of hermits.The only real rival to the Rule of St Benedict was the ‘Rule’ of Augustine, which was adopted by church leaders. These differed from monks, in that they were priests who could be active in the wider social community, for example, by serving in a parish church. They weren’t living under a monastic rule which confined a monk for life to the house in which he was consecrated. Priests serving in a cathedral, for example, were encouraged to live in a city but under a code like the Augustinian rule which was well-adapted to their needs.The 12th C saw the creation of new monastic orders. In Paris, the Victorines produced leading academic figures and teachers. The Premonstratensians were a group of Latin monks who took on the massive task of healing the rift between the Eastern and Western churches. The problem was, there was no corresponding monastic group in the East.We’ll pick it up at this point next time.Monasticism is an important part of Church History because of the huge impact it had shaping the faith of common Christians throughout the Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance. Some of the monastic leaders are the great pillars of the faith. We can’t really understand them without knowing a little about the world they lived in.As we end this episode, I want to again say thanks to all those listeners and subscribers who’ve “liked” and left comments on the CS FB page.I’d also like to say how appreciative I am to those who’ve gone to the iTunes subscription page for CS and left a positive review. We’ve developed a large listener base.Any donation to CS is appreciated.Finally, for interested subscribers, I want to invite you to take a listen to the sermon podcast for the church I serve; Calvary Chapel Oxnard. I teach expositionally through the Bible. You can subscribe via iTunes, just do a search for Calvary Chapel Oxnard podcast, or link to the calvaryoxnard.org website.

This is part 4 of our series on the Crusades.The plan for this episode, the last in our look at the Crusades, is to give a brief review of the 5th thru 7th Crusades, then a bit of analysis of the Crusades as a whole.The date set for the start of the 5th Crusade was June 1st, 1217. It was Pope Innocent III’s long dream to reconquer Jerusalem. He died before the Crusade set off, but his successor Honorius III was just as ardent a supporter. He continued the work begun by Innocent.The Armies sent out accomplished much of nothing, except to waste lives. Someone came up with the brilliant idea that the key to conquering Palestine was to secure a base in Egypt first. That had been the plan for the 4th Crusade. The Crusaders now made the major port of Damietta their goal. After a long battle, the Crusaders took the city, for which the Muslim leader Malik al Kameel offered to trade Jerusalem and all Christian prisoners he held. The Crusaders thought the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was on his way to bolster their numbers, so they rejected the offer. Problem is, Frederick wasn’t on his way. So in 1221, Damietta reverted to Muslim control.Frederick II cared little about the Crusade. After several false starts that revealed his true attitude toward the whole thing, the Emperor decided he’d better make good on his many promises and set out with 40 galleys and only 600 knights. They arrived in Acre in early Sept. 1228. Because the Muslim leaders of the Middle East were once again at odds with each other, Frederick convinced the afore-mentioned al-Kameel to make a decade long treaty that turned Jerusalem over to the Crusaders, along with Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the pilgrim route from Acre to Jerusalem. On March 19, 1229, Frederick crowned himself by his own hand in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.This bloodless assumption of Jerusalem infuriated Pope Gregory IX who considered control of the Holy Land and the destruction of the Muslims as one and the same thing. So the Church never officially acknowledged Frederick’s accomplishments.He returned home to deal with internal challenges to his rule and over the next decade and a half, the condition of Palestine’s Christians deteriorated. Everything gained by the treaty was turned back to Muslim hegemony in the Fall of 1244.The last 2 Crusades, the 6th and 7th, center on the career of the last great Crusader; the king of France, Louis IX.Known as SAINT Louis, he combined the piety of a monk with the chivalry of a knight, and stands in the front rank of all-time Christian rulers.  His zeal revealed itself not only in his devotion to religious ritual, but in his refusal to deviate from his faith even under the threat of torture. His piety was genuine as evidenced by his concern for the poor and the just treatment of his subjects. He washed the feet of beggars and when a monk warned him against carrying his humility too far, he replied, “If I spent twice as much time in gambling and hunting as in such services, no one would find fault with me.”The sack of Jerusalem by the Muslims in 1244 was followed by the fall of the Crusader bases in Gaza and Ashkelon. In 1245 at the Council of Lyons the Pope called for a new expedition to once again liberate the Holy Land. Though King Louis lay in a sickbed with an illness so grave his attendants put a cloth over his face, thinking he was dead, he rallied and took up the Crusader cross.Three years later he and his French brother-princes set out with 32,000 troops. A Venetian and Genoese fleet carried them to Cyprus, where large-scale preparations had been made for their supply. They then sailed to Egypt. Damietta once again fell, but after this promising start, the campaign turned into a disaster.Louis’ piety and benevolence was not backed up by what we might call solid skills as a leader. He was ready to share suffering with his troops but didn’t possess the ability to organize them.  Heeding the counsel of several of his commanders, he decided to attack Cairo instead of Alexandria, the far more strategic goal. The campaign was a disaster with the Nile being chocked with bodies of slain Crusaders. On their retreat, the King and Count of Poitiers were taken prisoners. The Count of Artois was killed. The humiliation of the Crusaders had rarely been so deep.Louis’ fortitude shone brightly while suffering the misfortune of being held captive. Threatened with torture and death, he refused to renounce Christ or yield up any of the remaining Crusader outposts in Palestine. For the ransom of his troops, he agreed to pay 500,000 livres, and for his own freedom to give up Damietta and abandon the campaign in Egypt.Clad in garments given by the sultan, in a ship barely furnished, the king sailed for Acre where he stayed 3 yrs, spending large sums on fortifications at Jaffa and Sidon. When his mother, who acted as Queen-Regent in his absence, died—Louis was forced to return to France. He set sail from Acre in the spring of 1254. His queen, Margaret, and the 3 children born them in the East, returned with him.So complete a failure might have been expected to destroy all hope of ever recovering Palestine. But the hold of the crusading idea upon the mind of Europe was still strong. Popes Urban IV and Clement III made renewed appeals, and Louis once again set out. In 1267, with his hand on a crown of thorns, he announced to his assembled nobles his purpose to go a 2nd time on a holy crusade.In the meantime, news from the East had been of continuous disaster at the hand of the “Mohammaden” enemy (as they called Muslims) and of discord among the Christians. In 1258, 40 Venetian vessels engaged in battle with a Genoese fleet of 50 ships off Acre with a loss of 1,700 souls. A year later the Templars and Hospitallers held forth in a pitched battle, not with the Muslims, but  each other. Then in 1268, Acre, greatest of the Crusader ports, fell to the Muslims Mamelukes.Louis set sail in 1270 w/60,000 into disaster. Their camp was scarcely pitched on the site of ancient Carthage when plague broke out. Among the victims was the king’s son, John Tristan, born at Damietta, and King Louis himself.  His body was returned to France and the French army disbanded.By 1291, what remained of the Crusader presence in the Holy Land was finally uprooted by Muslim control.Those more familiar with the history of the Crusades may wonder why I’ve neglected to mention the disastrous Children’s Crusade of 1212, inserted between the 4th and 5th Crusades. The reason I’ve decided to mostly skip it is because historians have come to doubt the veracity of the reports about it. It seems now more apocryphal than real, conflated from several disparate reports of groups that wandered around Southern Europe looking to hop on to another campaign to capture Jerusalem. The story goes that a French or German child of 10 years had a vision in which he was told to go to the Middle East and convert the Muslims by peaceful means. As he shared this vision and began his trek to Marseilles, other children joined his cause, along with some adults of dubious reputation. As their ranks swelled, they arrived at the French coast, expecting the seas to part and make a way for them to cross over to the Middle East on dry land. Never mind that it was a trip of hundreds of miles. Anyway, the waters failed to part, and the children, most of them anyway, ended up dispersing. Those who didn’t were rounded up by slavers who promised to transport them to the Holy Land, free of charge. Once they were aboard ship though, they were captives and were hauled to foreign ports all over the Mediterranean where they were sold off.As I said, while the Children’s Crusade has been considered a real event for many years, it’s recently come under scrutiny and doubt as ancient records were examined closely. It seems it’s more a product of cutting and pasting various stories that took place during this time. The children were in fact bands of Europe’s landless poor who had nothing better to do than wander around Southern France and Germany, waiting for the next Crusade to be called so they could go and hopefully participate in the plunder of the rich, Eastern lands.I want to offer some commentary now on the Crusades. So, warning, what follows is pure opinion.For 7 centuries Christians have tried to forget the Crusades, but critics and skeptics are determined to keep them a hot issue. While Jews and Muslims have (mostly rightly, I think) used the Crusades for generations as a point of complaint. In more recent time, New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have raised them like a crowbar and beaten Christians over the head with them. Isn’t it interesting that these God-deniers have to first assume Biblical morality to then deny it? If they were consistent with their own atheistic beliefs they’d have to find some other reason to declaim the Crusades than that it’s wrong to indiscriminately kill people. Why, according to their Darwinist evolutionary, Survival of the Fittest motif, shouldn’t they in fact applaud the Crusades? After all, they were advancing the cause of evolution by getting rid of the weaker elements of the race.But no! The New Atheists don’t use this line of reasoning because it’s abhorrent. Instead, they have to first don a belief in Christian morality to attack Christianity. Talk about being hypocritical.And let’s get our facts straight. The 20th Century saw more people killed for political and ideological reasons than all previous centuries combined! Between the Communists, Nazis, and Fascists, well over 100 million were killed. Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong were motivated by an atheistic agenda, one rooted in a social application of Darwinism.Karl Marx, the ideological father of Communistic socialism, applied Darwin’s evolutionary ideas to society and turned human beings into mere parts of a vast machine called the State. Anyone deemed a cog instead of a gear was to be removed so the machine could run as the leaders wanted. In the name of Communism, Stalin killed at least 20 million; Mao, about 70 million!Adolf Hitler was inspired by the atheist Fredrick Neizsche’s Darwinian concept of the ubermensche = the superman; humanity’s next evolutionary step. He justified the killing of 10 million saying the Final Solution was simply removing those who would hinder humanity’s evolution. He employed an entire army of science-minded killers who believed it was right and good to rid the world of “human weeds” as they called Jews, Slavs, homosexuals and the infirm.It takes a colossal ignorance of history to neglect this. Yet the New Atheists ignore the facts because they destroy their premise that atheism has the moral high ground.As calculated by historical evidence, the Crusades, Inquisition and witch trials killed about 200,000 in all over a period of 500 years. Adjusting for population growth, that would be about a million in today’s terms. That’s just 1% of the total killed by Stalin, Mao and Hitler; and they did it in a few decades!So, let’s keep the Crusades, as brutal as they were, and as utterly contrary to the nature and teaching of Christ as they were, in the proper historical perspective. No! I’m not justifying them. They were totally wrong-headed! To turn the cross into a sword and slay people with it is blasphemous and deserves the loud declamation of the Church.But let’s not forget that the Crusaders were human beings with motives not unlike our own. Those motives were mixed and often in conflict. The word crusade comes from “taking the cross,” after the example of Christ. That’s why on the way to the Holy Land the crusader wore the cross on his breast. On his journey home, he wore it on his back.But the vast majority of those who went crusading were illiterate, even most of the nobles. They weren’t taught the Bible as Evangelicals are today. People throughout Europe thought salvation rested IN THE CHURCH and was doled out by priests at the direction and discretion of the Pope. So if the Pope said Crusaders were doing God’s work, they were believed. When priests broadcast that dying in the holy cause of a Crusade meant they’d bypass purgatory and gain immediate access to heaven, thousands grabbed the nearest weapon and set off.For Urban and the popes who followed him, the Crusades were a new type of war, a Holy War. Augustine had laid down the principles of a “just war” centuries before. Those principles were . . .A Holy War was conducted by the State;Its purpose was the vindication of justice, meaning the defense of life and property;And its code called for respect for noncombatants; civilians and prisoners. While these principles were originally adopted by the Crusaders when they set out on the 1st Campaign, they evaporated in the heat of the journey and reality of battle.The Crusades ignited horrible attacks on Jews. Even fellow Christians were not exempt from rape and plunder. Incredible atrocities befell the Muslim foe. Crusaders sawed open dead bodies in search of gold.As the Crusades progressed, the occasional voice was lifted calling into question the propriety of such movements and their ultimate value. At the end of the 12th C, the abbot Joachim complained that the popes were making the Crusades a pretext for their own advancement.Humbert de Romanis, general of the Dominicans, in making out a list of matters to be handled at the Council of Lyons in 1274, was obliged to refute no less than 7 well-known objections to the Crusades. They included these 4 . . .It was contrary to the precepts of the NT to advance religion by the sword;Christians may defend themselves, but have no right to invade the lands of another;It is wrong to shed the blood of unbelievers;And the disasters of the Crusades proved they were contrary to the will of God. Christians in Europe during the 14th and 15th Cs were to face far more pressing problems than a conquest of the Holy Land. So while there was still an occasional call for one, it fell on deaf ears.Erasmus, writing at the close of the Middle Ages, made an appeal for the preaching of the Gospel as a way to deal with Muslims.  He said the proper way to defeat the Turks was by conversion, not annihilation. He said, “Truly, it is not meet to declare ourselves Christian men by killing very many but by saving very many, not if we send thousands of heathen people to hell, but if we make many infidels Christian; not if we cruelly curse and excommunicate, but if we with devout prayers and with our hearts desire their health, and pray unto God, to send them better minds.”The long-range results of 2 centuries of crusading were not impressive. If the main purpose of the Crusades was to win the Holy Land, to check the advance of Islam, and heal the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, they failed spectacularly.For a time, the 4 Crusader kingdoms held a beach-head on the Mediterranean coast of the Holy Land. In them, three semi-monastic military orders formed: the Templars, whose first headquarters were on the site of the old Temple of Jerusalem; the Hospitallers, also known as the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, originally founded to care for the sick and wounded; and the Germanic Teutonic Knights. These orders combined monasticism and militarism and had as their aims the protection of pilgrims and perpetual war against Muslims. They fielded 500 armed knights. Their great castles guarded the roads and passes against attack. For 2 centuries the Templars in their white robes decorated with a red cross, the Hospitallers in black robes emblazoned with the white Maltese cross, and the Teutonic Knights in white robes with a black cross were common sights in Crusader States and across Europe.While the Crusades seem to us today a terrible betrayal of Biblical Christianity, we must bring the historian’s mindset to them and consider them against the times in which they occurred. This doesn’t excuse them, but it does make them a bit more understandable.European society of the Middle Ages was ir-redeemably warlike. In feudal Europe, the whole economic and social system depended on the maintenance of a military; the knights, permanent professional soldiers; by necessity due to the cost involved, noblemen whose only profession was fighting. The city-states of Italy were frequently at war. In Spain, a line was drawn across the map for centuries by the presence of the Muslim Moors. So even if Christians had wanted to create a peaceful society, it would have been socially and practically difficult to do.One way of dealing with this was to idealize warfare. That is, casting war as a contest between good and evil. In the development of the idea of the Christian knight, there was an attempt to give the spiritual battle a corresponding literal application. The knight was a ‘soldier of Christ’, a warrior for good.  At a time when priests and monks were deemed the only ones able to make contact with God, the Crusades were a way for laypeople to enter the spiritual realm and rack up some serious points with God. Priests fought the good fight by prayer; now laymen could fight as well, with a sword, mace, or if that’s all they could afford, a pitchfork, until they got to the battlefield where hopefully they’d find a more suitable weapon.So it was important for medieval Christians to convince themselves the war they were fighting was justified. A sophisticated system of identifying a ‘just’ war developed. Augustine had said a good deal about this, explaining that someone whose property or land was stolen is entitled to get it back, but that this was different from warfare designed to enlarge one’s territory. The underlying principle was that reasonable force could be used to maintain order.The late 11th C saw the arrival of a new thought; not Augustine’s “Just War,” but the concept of “Holy War”, one God called His people to fight to restore Christian control to the Holy Land. This was war which could not only be regarded as ‘justified’, and the sins committed in the course of it forgiven, but meritorious. God would reward those who fought it. Guibert of Nogent, in his book The Acts of God through the Franks, explained how to identify a Holy War. It wasn’t motivated by the desire for fame, money or conquest. Its motive was the safeguarding of liberty, the defense of the State and the protection of the Church. He considered this kind of warfare a valid alternative to being a monk.This idea was so engaging to the Medieval mind that as the 12th C wound on it had to be discouraged as it seemed everyone began seeing knighthood and combat as spiritual warfare. Bullies have always been able to villainize those they want to victimize. They justified their brutality by calling it a divine mission. So priests and theologians emphasized not all fighting came under the same umbrella. Crusading was special.Of course, one of the major tenets of Muslim theology is jihad, Holy War to spread the faith. Despite loud protests by some today, the fact remains that the Islam Mohammad taught, which of course is true Islam, endorses jihad. How else did it spread from its desert base in Arabia across the Middle East, North Africa, and into Europe in such a short time if not by the power of the scimitar?I find it interesting that modern Muslims decry the Crusades when it was their own bloody campaigns that took the lands the Crusaders sought to what? RECLAIM! How could they RECLAIM something what wasn’t CLAIMED and conquered by the Muslims previously? I say it again: This in no way justifies the Crusades. They’re an indefensible period of Church history that stands as a dark stain. But let’s be clear; if they’re a stain on Church history, the conquests by the Muslims that predate the Crusades are just as dark.

This episode of CS is part 3 of our series on The Crusades.A major result of the First Crusade was a further alienation of the Eastern and Western Churches. The help provided Byzantium by the crusaders were not what The Eastern Emperor Alexius was hoping for.It also resulted in an even greater alienation of the Muslims than had been in place before. 200 years of crusading rampages across the Eastern Mediterranean permanently poisoned Muslim-Christian relations and ended the spirit of moderate tolerance for Christians living under Muslim rule across a wide swath of territory. The only people who welcomed the Crusaders were a handful of Christian minorities who’d suffered under Byzantine and Muslim rule; the Armenians and Maronites living in Lebanon. The Copts in Egypt saw the Crusades as a calamity. They were now suspected by Muslims of holding Western sympathies while being treated as schismatics by the Western Church. Once the Crusaders took Jerusalem, they banned Copts from making pilgrimage there.Things really went sour between East and West when the Roman church installed Latin patriarchates in historically Eastern centers at Antioch and Jerusalem. Then, during the 4th Crusade, a Latin patriarch was appointed to the church in Constantinople itself.To give you an idea of what this would have felt like to the Christian of Constantinople; imagine how Southern Baptists would feel if a Mormon bishop was installed as the President of the Southern Baptist Convention. You get the picture = No Bueno.Another long-lasting effect of the Crusades was that they weakened the Byzantine Empire and hastened its fall to the Ottoman Turks a couple centuries later. Arab governments were also destabilized leaving them susceptible to invasion by Turks and Mongols.A significant new development in monastic history was made at this time in the rise of the knightly monastic orders. The first of these was the Knights Templar, founded in 1118 under Hugh de Payens. King Baldwin gave the Templars their name, and from them the idea of fighting for the Temple passed to other orders. Bernard of Clairvaux, although not the author of the Templar rule, as legend has it, did write an influential piece called In Praise of the New Militia of Christ which lauded the new orders of knights.The Templars were imitated by the Hospitallers, who had an earlier origin as a charitable order. They’d organized in 1050 by merchants from Amalfi living in Jerusalem to protect pilgrims. They provided hospitality and care of the sick, and helped morph the word “hospitality” into “hospital.” Under Gerard in 1120, the Hospitallers gained papal sanction. Gerard’s successor was Raymond de Provence who reorganized the Hospitallers as a military order on the pattern of the Knights Templar. The Hospitallers, also known as the Knights of St. John eventually moved to the islands of Rhodes, then Malta, where they held out in 1565 in a protracted siege against the Turks in one of history’s most significant battles.Another important military order, the Teutonic Knights arose in 1199, during the 3rd Crusade.The knightly monastic orders had certain features in common. They viewed warfare as a devotional way of life. The old monastic idea of fighting demons, as seen in the ancient Egyptian desert hermits, evolved into actual combat with people cast as agents of evil. Spiritual warfare became actual battle. Knights and their attendants took the vows similar to other monks. They professed poverty, chastity, and obedience, along with a pledge to defend others by force of arms. While personal poverty was vowed, using violence to secure wealth was deemed proper so it could be used to benefit others, including the order itself. The Templars became an object of envy for their immense wealth.In studying the relations between Christianity and Islam during the Middle Ages, we should remember there were many peaceful interchanges. Some Christians advocated peaceful missions to Muslims. These peaceful encounters can be seen in the exchange of art. Christians highly valued Muslim metalwork and textiles. Church vestments were often made by Muslim weavers. Such a vestment is located today at Canterbury. It contains Arabic script saying, “Great is Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”On the positive side, if there was anything positive to be gleaned from the Crusades, it did promote a greater sense of unity in Western Europe. Remember that one of the reasons Pope Urban sparked the Crusade was to vent the violent habits of the European nobles who were constantly at each other’s throats. Instead of warring with each other back and forth across Europe, watering its fields with blood, they united to go against infidels “way over there.”The Crusades also led to increased prestige for the papacy as they were able to mobilize huge numbers of people.  The Crusades also stimulated an intellectual revival in Europe as Crusaders returned with new experiences and knowledge from another part of the world.After the 1st Crusade, over the next 60 years, Jerusalem saw a succession of weak rulers while the Muslims from Damascus to Egypt united under a new dynasty of competent and charismatic leaders. The last of these was Saladin, or, more properly, Salah ad-Din. Founder of the Ayyubid dynasty of Islam, he became caliph in 1174 and set out to retake Jerusalem.The king of Jerusalem at the time was (and warning: I’m going to butcher this poor guy’s name) Guy de Lusignan. Let’s just call him “Guy.” He led the Crusaders out to a hill on the West of the Sea of Galilee called the Horns of Hattin. Both the Templars and Hospitallers were there in force, and the much vaunted “true cross” was carried by the bishop of Acre, who himself was clad in armor. On July 5, 1187, the decisive battle was fought. The Crusaders were completely routed. 30,000 perished. King Guy, the leaders of the Templars and Hospitallers along with a few other nobles were taken prisoner. Saladin gave them clemency. The fate of the Holy Land was decided.On Oct. 2, 1187, Saladin entered Jerusalem after it made brave resistance. The generous conditions of surrender were mostly creditable to the chivalry of the Muslim commander. There were no scenes of savage butchery as followed the entry of the Crusaders 90 years before. The people of Jerusalem were given their liberty if they paid a ransom. Europeans and anyone else who wanted to, were allowed to leave. For 40 days the procession of the departing continued. Relics stored in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher were redeemed for the sum of 50,000 bezants. Named after Byzantium where they were the medium of exchange, the bezant was a gold coin of 5 grams.Thus ended the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Since then the worship of Islam has continued on Mount Moriah without interruption. The other European conquests of the 1st Crusade were then in danger from the unending feuds of the Crusaders themselves, and, in spite of the constant flow of recruits and treasure from Europe, they fell easily before Saladin.He allowed a merely ceremonial Latin ruler to hold the title King of Jerusalem but the last real king was Guy, who was released, then travelled around claiming the title of king but without a court or capital. He eventually settled in Cyprus.We’ll go into less detail for the rest of the Crusades as we finish them off over the next episode .The 2nd Crusade was sparked by 2 events; the Fall of the Crusader state of Edessa in Syria and the preaching of Bernard of Clairvaux. And note that the 2nd Crusade took place BEFORE the arrival of Saladin on the scene.Edessa fell to the Turks in Dec., 1144.  They built a fire in a large breach they’d made in the city wall. The fire was so hot it cracked a section of the wall a hundred yards long. When the wall collapsed, the Turks rushed in and unleashed the same kind of brutality the Crusaders had when they conquered Jerusalem.Pope Eugenius III saw the Turk victory at Edessa as a threat to the continuance of the Crusaders in Palestine and called upon the king of France to march to their relief. The forgiveness of all sins and immediate entrance into heaven were promised to all embarking on a new Crusade. Eugenius summoned Bernard of Clairvaux to leave his abbey and preach the crusade. Bernard was the most famous person of his time and this call by the Pope came at the zenith of his fame. He regarded the Pope’s summons as a call from God.On Easter in 1146, King Louis of France vowed to lead the Crusade. The Pope’s promise of the remission of sins was dear to him as he was stricken with guilt for having burned a church with 1300 inside. How grand to be able to gain forgiveness by killing more! He assembled a council at Vézelai at which Bernard made such an overpowering impression by his message that all present pressed forward to take up the crusading cause. Bernard was obliged to cut his own robe into small fragments, to give away to all who wanted something of his they could carry to the East. He wrote to Pope Eugenius that the enthusiasm was so great “castles and towns were emptied of their inmates. One man could hardly be found for 7 women, and the women were being everywhere widowed while their husbands were still alive.” Meaning most of the men set off on the Crusade, leaving the population of France with 7 women to every man. Hey – lucky them!From France, Bernard went to Basel, in modern day Switzerland, then up thru the cities along the Rhine as far as Cologne. As in the 1st Crusade, persecution broke out against the Jews in this area when a monk named Radulph questioned why they needed to go to the Middle East to get rid of God-haters and Christ-killers. There were plenty of them in Europe.  Bernard objected vehemently to this. He called for the Church to attempt to win the Jews by discussion and respect, not killing them.Bernard was THE celebrity of the day and thousands flocked to hear him. Several notable miracles and healings were attributed to him. The German Emperor Konrad III was deeply moved by his preaching and convinced to throw his weight to the Crusade.Konrad raised an army of 70,000; a tenth of whom were knights. They assembled at Regensburg and proceeded thru Hungary to the Bosporus. All along their route they were less than welcome. Konrad and the Eastern Emperor Manuel where brothers-in-law, but that didn’t keep Manuel from doing his best to wipe out the German force. The guides he provided led the Germans into ambushes and traps then abandoned them in the mountains. When they finally arrived at Nicea, famine, fever and attacks had reduced the force to a tenth is original size.King Louis set out in the Spring of 1147 and followed the same route Konrad had taken. His queen, Eleanor, famed for her beauty and skill as a leader, along with many other ladies of the French court, accompanied the army. The French met up with what was left of Konrad’s force at Nicea.The forces then split up into different groups which all reached Acre in 1148. They met King Baldwin III of Jerusalem and pledged to unite their forces in an attempt to conquer Damascus before retaking Edessa. The siege of Damascus was a total failure. The European nobles fell to such in-fighting that their camp fragmented into warring groups. Konrad left for Germany in the Fall of 1148 and Louis returned to France a few months later.Bernard was humiliated by the failure of the Crusade. He assigned it to the judgment of God for the sins of the Crusaders and Christian world.A little more about King Louis’s wife Eleanor. Eleanor of Aquitaine was really something. In a world dominated by men, Eleanor’s career was something special. She was one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in Europe during the Middle Ages.Eleanor succeeded her father as the ruler of Aquitaine and Poitiers at the age of 15. She was then the most eligible bride in Europe. Three months after her accession, she married King Louis VII. As Queen of France, she went on the 2nd Crusade. Then, with it’s defeat and back in France, she got an annulment from Louis on the basis that they were relatives, then married Henry Plantaget, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, who soon became King Henry II of England in 1154. This despite the fact that Henry was an even closer relative than Louis had been and 9 years younger than she. They were married just 8 weeks after her annulment. Over the next 13 years Eleanor bore Henry 8 children: 5 sons, 3 of whom would become king, and 3 daughters. However, Henry and Eleanor eventually became estranged. She was imprisoned between 1173 and 1189 for supporting her son’s revolt against her husband.Eleanor was widowed in July 1189. Her husband was succeeded by their son, Richard I, known as the Lion-hearted. As soon as he ascended the thrown, Richard had his mother released from prison. Now the queen dowager, Eleanor acted as regent while Richard went on the 3rd Crusade. She survived Richard and lived well into the reign of her youngest son John, known as the worst king in England’s long history. It’s this King John who’s cast as the chief villain in the story of Robin Hood.The 3rd Crusade is referred to as the Kings' Crusade due to the European monarchs who participated in it. It was an attempt to reconquer the Holy Land from the Muslims who, under Saladin, had reclaimed the lands the Crusaders took in the 1st Crusade. The 3rd was for the most part successful but fell short of its ultimate goal, the re-conquest of Jerusalem.When Saladin captured Jerusalem in 1187, the news rocked Europe. The story goes that Pope Urban III was so traumatized, he died of shock. Henry II of England and Philip II of France ended their dispute with each other to lead a new crusade. When Henry died 2 years later, Richard the Lionheart stepped in to lead the English. The elderly Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa also responded to the call to arms, and led a massive army across Turkey. Barbarossa drowned while crossing a river in June, 1190 before reaching the Holy Land. His death caused great grief among the German Crusaders. Most were so discouraged they returned home.After driving the Muslims from the port of Acre, Frederick's successor Leopold V of Austria and King Philip of France left the Holy Land in August 1191, leaving Richard to carry on by himself. Saladin failed to defeat Richard in any military engagements, and Richard secured several key coastal cities. But the English King realized a conquest of Jerusalem wasn’t possible to his now weakened force and in September of 1192, made a treaty with Saladin by which Jerusalem would remain under Muslim control, but allowed unarmed Christian pilgrims and merchants to visit the city. Richard departed the Holy Land a month later.The successes of the 3rd Crusade allowed the Crusaders to maintain a considerable kingdom based in Cyprus and along the Syrian coast. Its failure to recapture Jerusalem led to the call for a 4th Crusade 6 years later.The 3rd Crusade was yet another evidence of the European’s inability to form an effective union against the Muslims. The leaders and nobility of Europe made great promises of unity when they embarked on a Crusade, but the rigors of the journey, along with the imminent prospect of victory saw them more often than not falling out with each other in incessant and petty squabbles.On Richard’s journey back to England he was seized by the afore mentioned Leopold, duke of Austria, whose enmity he’d incurred in the battle for the city of Joppa. The duke turned his captive over to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI who also had a grudge to settle. The Lionheart was released on the humiliating terms of paying an enormous ransom and consenting to hold his kingdom as a fiefdom of the Empire.  It’s this hostage taking of Richard the Lionhearted that forms the backdrop for the tale of Robin Hood.Saladin died in March, 1193, by far the most famous of the foes of the Crusaders. Christendom has joined with Arab writers in praise of his courage, culture, and the magnanimous manner in which he treated his foes.Historians debate how many Crusades there were. It wasn’t as though Kings Henry and Philip said, “Hey, let’s make nice and launch the 3rd Crusade.” They didn’t number them as historians have since. History tends to ascribe 9 as the number of Crusades, but then add 2 more by assigning them with names instead of numbers; the Albigenian and the Children’s Crusades, which took place between the 4th and 5th Crusades.Generally, the 5th thru 9th Crusades are considered lesser armed movements while the first 4 are called the Great Crusades.We’ll finish with a quick review of the 4th Crusade.Innocent III became Pope in 1198.  He called for the 4th Crusade which was the final blow that forever sundered the Western and Eastern churches, though that was certainly never his aim. In fact, he warned the Crusaders against it.Pope Innocent’s plan was simply to destroy a Muslim military base in Egypt. The merchants of Venice had promised to supply the Crusaders with ships at a huge discount; one the Crusaders couldn’t pass up. So in the summer of 1202, they arrived in Venice expecting to sail to Egypt. But there was a problem: Only a third of the expected number of warriors showed. And they came up with a little more than half the required sailing fee.A prince from the East offered to finance the balance under one condition: That the Crusaders sail first to Constantinople, dethrone the current Emperor and hand it over to him. They could then sail on their merry way to Egypt. Pope Innocent forbade this diversion, but no one paid him any attention.On July 5th, 1203, the Crusaders arrived in the Eastern capital. The people of Constantinople were by now fed up with Europeans meddling in their affairs and formed a counter revolution that swept the current emperor off the throne, but only so they could install their own fiercely anti-Crusader ruler. Being now shut out of his hopes, the would-be emperor who’d paid the Crusaders way to Constantinople refused to pay their way to Egypt, leaving them stranded in increasingly hostile territory.They were furious. Their leaders decided to try and make the best of it and called for a quick plundering of Constantinople. One of the Crusade chaplains proclaimed; in complete disregard for the Pope’s wishes, “If you rightly intend to conquer this land and bring it under Roman obedience, all who die will partake of the pope's indulgence.”  That was like letting a rabid dog off its chain. For many of the Crusaders, this was not only an excuse to get rich by taking loot, it meant a license to do whatever they pleased in Constantinople.On Good Friday, 1204, the Crusaders, with red crosses on their tunics, sacked Constantinople. For 3 days, they raped and killed fellow Christians. The city's statues were hacked to pieces and melted down. The Hagia Sophia was stripped of its golden vessels. A harlot performed sensual dances on the Lord's Table, singing vile drinking songs. One Eastern writer lamented, “Muslims are merciful compared with these men who bear Christ's cross on their shoulders.”Neither the Eastern Empire nor Church ever recovered from those 3 days. For the next 60 years Crusaders from the Roman church ruled what was once the Eastern Empire. The Eastern emperor established a court in exile at Nicaea. Rather than embrace Roman customs, many Eastern Christians fled there. There they remained until 1261, when an Eastern ruler retook Constantinople.

Episode 55 – The Crusades, Part 2As Bruce Shelly aptly states in in his excellent book Church History in Plain Language, for the past 700 years Christians have tried to forget the Crusades, though neither Jews nor Muslims will let them. Modern Christians want to dismiss that era of Church History as the insane bigotry of the illiterate and superstitious. But to do so is to show our own kind of bigotry, one neglectful of the historical context of the European Middle Ages.The Crusaders were human beings, who like us, had mixed motives often in conflict. The word crusade means to “take up the cross,” hopefully after the example of Christ. That’s why on the way to the Holy Land crusaders wore the cross on their chest. On their return home they wore it on their back. [1]In rallying the European nobility to join the First Crusade, Pope Urban II promised them forgiveness of past sins. Most of them held a deep reverence for the land Jesus had walked. That devotion was captured later by Shakespeare when he has King Henry IV say:We are impressed and engag’d to fight … To chase those pagans in those holy fields, Over whose acres walked those blessed feet, Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail’d, For our advantage on the bitter cross.For Urban and later popes, the Crusades were a Holy War. Augustine, whose theology shaped the Medieval Church, laid down the principles of a “just war.”  He said that it must be conducted by the State; its broad purpose was to uphold an endangered justice, which meant more narrowly that it must be defensive to protect life and property. In conducting such a just war there must be respect for noncombatants, hostages, and prisoners. And while all this may have been in the mind of Pope Urban and other church leaders when they called the First Crusade, those ideals didn’t make it past the boundary of Europe. Once the Crusaders arrived in the East, the difficulties of their passage conspired to justify in their minds the wholesale pillaging of the innocent. Even those who’d originally taken up the Crusader cross with noble intent, didn’t want to be left out of acquiring treasure once the looting began. After all, everyone else is doing it?As we return to our narrative of the First Crusade, let’s recap …What triggered the Crusade was a request for assistance from Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos. Alexios worried about the advances of the Muslim Seljuk Turks, who’d reached as far west as Nicaea, a suburb of Constantinople. In March 1095, Alexios sent envoys to the Council of Piacenza to ask Pope Urban II for aid against the Turks. Urban’s reply was positive. It’s likely he hoped to heal the Great Schism of 40 yrs before that had sundered Western and Eastern churches.In the Summer of 1095, Urban turned to his homeland of France to recruit for the campaign. His journey ended at the Council of Clermont in November, where he gave an impassioned sermon to a large audience of French nobles and clergy, detailing the atrocities committed against pilgrims and Christians living in the East by the Muslims.Malcolm Gladwell wrote a bestseller in 2000 called The Tipping Point. The Pope’s speech was one of those, an epic tipping point that sent history in a new direction. Urban understood what he proposed as an act so expensive, long, and arduous that it amounted to a form of penance capable of discharging all sins for those who went crusading. And he understood how his audience’s minds worked. Coming from a noble house himself and having worked his way up through the ranks of the monastery and Church, he understood the puzzle that lay at the heart of popular religious sentiment. People were keenly aware of their sinfulness and sought to expunge it by embarking on a pilgrimage, or if that wasn’t possible, to endow a monk or nun so they could live a life of sequestered holiness on their behalf. But their unavoidable immersion in the world meant it was impossible to perform all of the time-consuming penances which could keep pace with their ever-increasing catalog of sin. Urban saw that he could cut the Gordian knot by prescribing a Crusade. Here at last was a way for men given to violence, one of the most grievous of their misdeeds, to USE it as an act of penance. Overnight, those who were the most in need of penance became the very ones most likely to be the cause of the Crusade’s success.While there are different versions of Urban’s sermon, they all name the same basic elements. The Pope talked about the need to end the violence the European knights continued among themselves, the need to help the Eastern Christians in their contest with Islam, and making the pathways of pilgrims to Jerusalem safe again.  He proposed to do this by waging a new kind of war, an armed pilgrimage that would lead to great spiritual and earthly rewards, in which sins would be remitted and anyone who died in the contest would bypass purgatory and enter immediately into heaven’s bliss.The Pope’s speech at Clermont didn’t specifically mention liberating Jerusalem; the goal at first was just to help Constantinople and clear the roads to Jerusalem.  But Urban's later message as he travelled thru Europe raising support for the Crusade, did include the idea of liberating the Holy City.While Urban's speech seemed impromptu, it was in fact well-planned.  He’d discussed launching a crusade with two of southern France's most important leaders who gave enthusiastic support. One of them was at Clermont, the first to take up the cause. During what was left of 1095 and into 96, Pope Urban spread the message throughout France and urged the clergy to preach in their own regions and churches throughout Europe.Despite this planning, the response to call for the Crusade was a surprise. Instead of urging people to JOIN the campaign, bishops had to dissuade certain people from joining.  Women, monks, and the infirm were forbidden, though many protested their exclusion. Some did more than protest; the defied officials and made plans to go anyway. When Pope Urban originally conceived the crusade, he envisioned the knights and nobility leading out trained armies. It was a surprise when thousands of peasants took up the cause.What was the bishop to say to these peasants when they indicated their intent to go? “You can’t. You have to stay and tend your fields and herds.” When the peasants asked why, the bishops had no good answer, so they formed companies and set off. The clergy was forced to give grudging permission. They gathered local groups of peasants and had them take a vow of devotion to the Holy Cause, setting as their destination, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.Alongside the enthusiasm of the peasants, Urban courted the nobility of Europe, especially in France, to lead the Crusade. Knights from both northern and southern France, Flanders, Germany, and Italy were divided into four armies. Sadly, they often saw themselves in competition with each other rather than united in a common cause. They vied for prominence in bringing glory to God; oh, and of course, the loot that went along with it.While it was the scion of the noble houses that led a few of the armies, the bulk of the knights were lesser sons of the nobility whose only route to wealth lay in conquest. The eldest brother was set to inherit the family name and estate. So hundreds of these younger sons saw the Crusades as a way to make a name for themselves and carve out their own domain in newly acquired lands. If they didn’t return to Europe laden with treasure, they hoped to settle down on land they’d won with the sword.One of the many sad results of the spin-up for the First Crusade was the persecution of Jews in Northern France and the Rhineland. Anti-Semitism bubbled beneath the surface of this region for generations. It spilled over now as peasants and commoners mobilized to remove the infidels form the Holy Land. Some began to question why a trip to the Middle East was needed when there were Christ-haters living right at hand. So Jews were attacked, their homes burned, businesses sacked.As we saw in our last episode, the peasants formed into bands and rampaged their way across Europe to Constantinople. They lacked the discipline and supplies of the knights so they foraged their way East like Sherman on his march to the Sea during the American Civil war. Though we don’t know the numbers, thousands of these peasant crusaders were killed along the way as armed defenders came out to oppose their trek across their lands.When they finally arrived in Constantinople, they were hurriedly escorted across the Bosporus in August of 1096. At that point they split into two groups. One tried to recapture Nicaea but failed when the Turks surrounded and wiped them out. The other group was ambushed and massacred in October.This phase of the First Crusade is called The People’s Crusade because it was made up of btwn 20 and 30,000 commoners. Its leadership include some minor nobles but its most visible leader was the odd Peter the Hermit.Peter’s leadership of The People’s Crusade was due to his fiery recruitment sermons. He wasn’t so skilled in the tactical management of 30,000 would-be warriors. Once they arrived in Constantinople, his lack of administrative skill became obvious and the handful of knights who’d joined up realized they need to take control. But they refused to submit to one another and fragmented into different groups based on nationality. This lack of leadership proved fatal. They lost control of their so-called army which set to looting the homes and towns of Eastern Christians. The German contingent managed to seize a Seljuk city and the French began agitating for their leaders to do likewise. A couple Turkish spies spread a rumor in the French camp that the Germans were marching on Nicaea. So the French rushed out to beat them to it. While passing thru a narrow valley, they were wiped out by waiting Seljuk forces.A remnant made it back to Constantinople where they joined up with the knights who were just then, at the end of the Summer, arriving from Europe. This force formed into contingents grouped around the great lords. This was the kind of military force Pope Urban II and the Emperor Alexius had envisioned.The Crusaders realized they had to conquer and occupy Antioch in Syria first or a victory over Jerusalem would be short-lived. They took the city, but then barely survived a siege laid in by the Turks. Breaking the siege in the Spring of 1099, the leaders of the Crusade ended their quarrels and marched South. Their route took them along the coast to Caesarea, where they headed inland toward their goal. They arrived in the vicinity of Jerusalem in early June.By that time the army was reduced to 20,000. The effect of seeing the Holy City for the first time was electrifying. These men had fought and slogged their way across thousands of miles, leaving their homes and cultures to encounter new sights, sounds and tastes. And every step of the way, their goal was Jerusalem—the place where Jesus had lived and died. Accounts of that moment say the warriors fell on their knees and kissed the sacred earth. They removed their armor and in bare feet w/tears, cried out to God in confession and praise.A desperate but futile attack was made on the City five days later. Boiling pitch and oil were used by Jerusalem’s defenders, with showers of stones and anything else they could get their hands on that would do damage. Then the Crusaders set a siege that took the usual course. Ladders, scaling towers, and other siege-engines were built. The problem is, they had to travel miles to get wood.  The trees around Jerusalem had all been cut down by the Roman General Titus twelve centuries before. They’d never grown back.The City was surrounded on 3 sides by Raymund of Toulouse, Godfrey, Tancred, and Robert of Normandy. It was a hot Summer and the suffering of the besiegers was intense as water was scarce. Soon, the valleys and hills around the city walls were covered w/dead horses, whose rotting carcasses made life in camp unbearable.Someone got the brilliant idea to duplicate Joshua’s battle plan at Jericho. So the Crusaders took off their shoes and with priests leading, began marching around Jerusalem, hoping the walls would fall down. Of course, they didn’t. I wonder what they did with the guy who came up with the idea. Help at last came with the arrival of a fleet at Joppa harbor from Genoa carrying workmen and supplies who went to work building new siege gear.The day of the final assault finally arrived. A huge tower topped by a golden cross was dragged up to the walls and a massive plank bridge was dropped so the Crusaders could rush from tower to the top of the wall. The weakened defenders couldn’t stop the mass of warriors who flooded into their City.The carnage that followed is one more chapter in the many such scenes Jerusalem has known.Once they’d secured the City, the blood-splattered Crusaders paused to throw God a bone. Led by Godfrey, freshly changed into a suit of white linen, the Crusaders went to the church of the Holy Sepulcher and offered prayers and thanksgiving. Then, devotions over, the massacre recommenced. Neither the tears of women, nor the cries of children, did anything to halt to terror. The leaders tried to restrain their troops but they’d been let off the chain and were determined to let as much blood out of bodies as possible.When it was finally over, Muslim prisoners were forced to clear the streets of the bodies and blood to save the city from pestilence.Remember Peter the Hermit, who’d lead the peasant army to disaster? He made it to Jerusalem before returning to Europe where he founded a monastery and died in 1115.Pope Urban II also died just 2 weeks after the fall of Jerusalem, before the news reached him.Looking back, it’s clear the First Crusade came at probably the only time it could have been successful.  The Seljuk Turks had broken up into rival factions in 1092. The Crusaders entered into the region like a knife before a new era of Muslim union and conquest opened. That’s what those newly arrived Crusaders would now have to face.Just eight days after capturing Jerusalem, a permanent government was set-up. It was called “The Kingdom of Jerusalem.” Godfrey was elected king, but declined the title of royalty, unwilling to wear a crown of gold where the Savior had worn a crown of thorns.  He adopted the title Baron and Defender of the Holy Sepulcher.From the moment of its birth, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was in trouble. Less than a year later they made an appeal to the Germans for reinforcements. And Godfrey survived the capture of Jerusalem by only a year. He was buried in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where his sword and spurs are still on display. On his tomb is the inscription: “Here lies Godfrey of Bouillon, who conquered all this territory for the Christian religion. May his soul be at rest with Christ.”Rome immediately moved to make The Kingdom of Jerusalem part of it’s region of hegemony. The archbishop of Pisa, Dagobert, who’d been a part of the Crusade, was elected to be Jerusalem’s Patriarch.The new rulers turned from conquest to defense and governing. They tried to layer the feudal system of Europe onto Middle Eastern society. The conquered territory was distributed among Crusader barons, who held their possessions under the king of Jerusalem as overlord. The four chief fiefs were Jaffa, Galilee, Sidon, and east of the Jordan River, a region called Kerat. The counts of Tripoli and Edessa and the prince of Antioch were independent of Jerusalem but were closely allied due to the nearby Muslim menace.The Crusader occupation of Israel was far from peaceful. The kingdom was torn by constant intrigues of civil rulers and religious clerics. All that while it faced unending threats from without. But it was the inner strife that was the main cause of weakness. Monks settled in swarms all over the country. The Franciscans became guardians of the holy places. The offspring of the Crusaders by Moslem women, called pullani, became a blight as they were given over to unrelenting greed and the most grotesque immorality.When Godfrey died, he was succeeded by his brother Baldwin, count of Edessa. Baldwin was intelligent and the most active king of Jerusalem. He died after eight years; his body laid next to his brother’s.During Baldwin’s reign, the kingdom grew significantly. Caesarea fell to the Crusaders in 1101, then Ptolemais in 1104. Beirut in 1110. But Damascus never fell to the Crusaders. With the progress of their arms, they built castles all over their holdings in the Middle East. The ruins of those fortifications stand today and are premier tourist sites.Many of the Crusaders, who began the adventure planning to return to Europe, decided rather to stay once the work of conquest was finished. One wrote, “We who were Westerners, are now Easterners. We have forgotten our native land.” Other Crusaders did return to Europe, only to return later. Even several European kings spent long stays in the Holy Land.During Baldwin’s reign most of the leaders of the First Crusade either died or went home. But their ranks were continually replenished by fresh expeditions from Europe. Pope Pascal II, successor to Urban II, sent out a call for recruits. The Italian cities furnished fleets, and coordinated with land forces. The Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese established quarters of their own in Jerusalem, Acre, and other cities. Thousands took up the Crusader cause in Lombardy, France, and Germany. They were led by Anselm, archbishop of Milan, Stephen, duke of Burgundy, William, duke of Aquitaine, Ida of Austria, and others. Hugh who’d gone home, returned. Bohemund also came back with 34,000.  Two Crusader armies attacked the Islamic stronghold at Bagdad.Baldwin’s nephew, also named Baldwin, succeeded his uncle and reigned for 13 years, till 1131. He conquered the strategic city of Tyre on the coast. It was 1124 and that marked the high-water point of Crusader power.Over the next 60 yrs, Jerusalem saw a succession of weak rulers while the Muslims from Damascus to Egypt were uniting under a new band of competent and charismatic leaders. The last of these was Saladin. He became caliph in 1174 and set out to retake Jerusalem.But that’s for our next episode . . .[1] Shelley, B. L. (1995). Church history in plain language (Updated 2nd ed.) (187–188). Dallas, Tex.: Word Pub.

Episode 54 – The Crusades – Part 1In the first episode of Communio Sanctorum, we took a look at the various ways history has been studied over time. In the Ancient world, history was more often than not, propaganda. The old adage that “History is written by the winners” was certainly true for the ancients. With the implementation of the Scientific Method in the Modern Era, the researching and recording of history became more unbiased and accurate. It was far from a pure report, but it could no longer be considered blatant propaganda. The Post-Modern Era has seen a return to bias; this time an almost knee-jerk suspicion of ALL previous attempts at recording history. Even attempts of Modernity to document history are suspect and assumed guilty of recording little more than the bias of the authors, though their works were footnoted and peer-reviewed. Post-modern critics adopt a presupposition all recorded history is fabrication, especially if there’s anything heroic or virtuous. If it’s a dark tale of hopelessness and tragedy, well, then, maybe it can be accepted. It’s almost as though Post-moderns want to make up for the ancient historians’ penchant for propaganda. Post-Moderns cast history as “neg-paganda” if I can coin a word.Let’s attempt a shedding of our bias, even though we can’t fully do that, as we look at the Crusades. Instead of layering onto the Christians of Europe in the 11th and 12th Cs the sensibilities of people who live a thousand years later, let’s attempt to understand the reasoning behind the idea of taking up a pitchfork or sword and making a life-altering trip over hundreds of miles, through strange lands, to risk one’s life for è What? Oh yeah, to rid the Holy Land of pagan infidels.Wait; Mr. Crusader-person; have you ever been to the Holy Land? Do you own land there that’s been stolen? Do you have relatives or friends there you need to protect?  Have you ever met one of these infidels? Do you know what they believe or why they invaded?No? Then why are you so amped about marching half-way around the world to liberate a land you’ve not been all that interested in before from a people you know nothing about?See? There must have been some powerful forces at work in the minds and hearts of the people of Europe that they’d go in such large numbers on a Crusade. We may find their reasons for crusading to be horribly ill-conceived, but they were totally sold out to them.The Crusades reflected a new dynamism in the Christianity of Medieval Europe. People were driven by religious fervor, a yearning for adventure, and of course if some personal wealth could be thrown in, all the better. For 200 years, Crusaders tried to expel the Muslims from the Holy Land. It seems all the colorful figures of this era were caught up in the cause, from Peter the Hermit in the 1st Crusade, to the godly Louis IX, King of France, who inspired the 6th and 7th.Many Europeans of the medieval period viewed a pilgrimage as a form of especially poignant penance. These pilgrimages were usually trips to a local holy place or shrine erected to commemorate a miracle or to cathedrals where the relics of some saint were kept in a reliquary. But there was one pilgrimage that was thought to gain a special dose of grace – a trip to the Holy City of Jerusalem. The merchants of Jerusalem did a good business in keeping the constant flood of Christian pilgrims supplied with food, lodging and of course sacred mementos. Some pilgrims went by themselves; others in a group—ancient versions of the modern day Holy Land Tour. When pilgrims arrived in Jerusalem they’d make the rounds of all the traditional points of interest. They walked the Via Dolorosa to Calvary then sat for hours praying. When these pilgrims returned home, they were esteemed by their community as real saints; towering figures of spirituality.For centuries, peaceful pilgrims traveled from Europe to Palestine. The arrival of Islam in the Middle East in the 7th C didn’t interfere. By the 10th C European bishops organized mass pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The largest we know of set out from Germany in 1065, with some 7,000 ! That’s a lot of buses.To impede a pilgrim's journey was considered by the medieval Church as a serious breach of protocol because you endangered the pilgrim’s salvation. If his pilgrimage was penance for some sin, you might deny him pardon by your altering his course. The mind-set of European Christians became one of extreme care to not interfere with Pilgrims once they’d set out.All of this faced a major problem in the 11th C when a new Muslim force took control of the Middle East. The Seljuk Turks, new and fanatical converts to Islam, came sweeping in to plunder the region. They seized Jerusalem from their fellow Muslims, then moved north into Asia Minor.The Byzantine Empire tried desperately to stop their advance, but at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 the Turks captured the eastern emperor and scattered his army. Within a few years nearly all Asia Minor, the chief source of Byzantine wealth and troops, was lost, and the new Byzantine emperor sent frantic appeals to the West for help. He pleaded with Europe’s nobility and the Pope, seeking mercenaries to aid in the rescue of lost territory.Then, reports began to trickle back about the abuse of Christian pilgrims on the Turkish controlled roads to Jerusalem. The trickle turned to a stream, the a river. Even when pilgrims weren’t mistreated, they were subject to heavy fees to travel thru Muslim lands.The standard, brief description of the inception of the First Crusade goes like this ... In 1095, the Eastern Emperor Alexius I sent an urgent appeal for help against the Muslims to Pope Urban II. The Pope responded by preaching one of history's most influential sermons. In a field near Clermont, France he said to the huge crowd that had gathered, “Your Eastern brothers have asked for your help. Turks and Arabs have conquered their territories.  I, or rather, the Lord begs you, destroy that vile race from their lands!”But there was more to Urban’s appeal than just liberating the East from infidel hordes. He also mentioned the European need for more land. He said, "For this land which you inhabit is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder and devour one another, enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulcher; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves.”Popes and bishops were accustomed to making such bold proclamations and issuing stirring appeals. They were nearly always met by loud “Amens!” and affirmations of the rightness of their call. Then people went home to lunch and promptly forgot all about what they’d just heard.  So the response to Urban’s sermon that day was astonishing. The crowd began to chant, “Deus vult = God wills it!” But they did more than chant. People across the entire socio-economic spectrum of Europe began preparations to do precisely what the Pope had said è Go to Jerusalem and liberate it from the Muslims. They sewed crosses onto their tunics, painted them on their shields, fired up the smithies and made swords, spears and maces. Commoners who couldn’t afford armor or real weapons, made clubs and sharpened sticks.They were going to go on a new kind of pilgrimage. Not as humble worshippers but as armed warriors. Their enemy wasn’t the world, the flesh and the devil; it was the Muslim infidel defiling the Holy Places.As the Pope ended his impassioned appeal to the loud affirmation of the crowd, he declared their slogan Deus Vult! would be the crusader battle cry in the coming campaign.The pilgrims agreed to make their way east any way they could, gathering at Constantinople. Then they'd form into armies and march south toward the enemy.The First Crusade was underway.As word spread across France and Germany of the holy mission, people from across all social levels were caught up in Crusader fervor. A similar excitement was seen in the California and Yukon Gold Rushes. It's not difficult to understand why. We need to be careful here because removed by a thousand years we can't presume to know the motivations that shaped every Crusader's actions, even though there are not a few historians who claim to be able to do so. Surely motives were mixed and diverse. Some, out of simple obedience to the Church and Pope, believed it was God's will to expel the Muslims from the Holy Land. Being illiterate peasants, they couldn’t read the Bible or know God's will on the matter. They believed it was the Pope's duty to tell them what God willed and trusted him to do it. When the Pope declared anyone who died in the holy cause would bypass purgatory and enter directly into heaven, all the incentive needed to go was provided for thousands who lived in the constant fear of ever being good enough to merit heaven.Another powerful incentive was the opportunity for wealth. Medieval Europe was locked in a rigid feudalism that kept the poor in perpetual poverty. There was simply no rising above the social level one was born into. A Crusade offered a chance at the unthinkable. The loot of a successful campaign could bring great wealth, even to a peasant. And those who returned gained a reputation as a warrior that could see them and their sons raised into positions of relative honor in a noble’s army.The risks were great; but the benefits both tangible and significant. So thousands took up the crusader cause.The problem for the thousands of peasants who wanted to go was that no noble would lead them. On the contrary, the nobles wanted their serfs to stay home and tend their fields and farms. But the Pope's appeal had gone out to all and no noble wanted to be seen as contradicting the Church. So they just hoped no one would rise to lead them. It was one of those moments of profound leadership vacuum that just begged to be filled; who filled it was a man known as Peter the Hermit.Of all the Crusaders, Peter surely had the strongest scent. The monk had not bathed in decades. He rode a donkey that, eyewitnesses said, bore a remarkable resemblance to its owner. Peter's preaching was even more powerful than his odor. In 9 months, he gathered 20,000 peasants under his banner, then began the long and difficult trek east to Constantinople.They created chaos as soon as they arrived. Complaints of robbery poured into the Emperor's office. He knew these Western European peasants were no match for the Muslims, but he couldn't let them camp out in his city. They were ferried across the river where they immediately began pillaging the homes of Eastern Christians. Many of these poor, uneducated and illiterate peasants had come for loot and saw plenty of it right there. They'd already travelled a long way from home and were now among a people who spoke a different language, wore different styles and ate different foods. “Why, they don't look like Christians at all! And what's that you say? These people don't follow the Pope? Well, then maybe they aren't Christians. Didn't we set out to fight unbelievers? Here are some. Let's get to work.”“But these aren't Muslims!”“Okay. We'll compromise. We won't kill them; we'll just take their stuff.”Peter's peasant army put additional strain on the already poor relations between the Eastern and Roman churches. Two months later, the peasants marched straight into a Muslim ambush and were wiped out. Peter, who was in Constantinople rounding up supplies—was the lone survivor. He then joined another army, this one led by European nobility who arrived well after the peasants. These Crusaders defeated the Muslims at Antioch then continued on to Jerusalem.The Muslims failed to take this second movement of the Crusade seriously. It’s not difficult to understand why. They’d just defeated a huge force of Europeans easily. They assumed they’d do the same to the smaller force that came against them now. What they didn’t realize was that this force, while indeed smaller, was the cream of Europe’s warrior class; mounted and armored knights who grew up on battle.On July 15, 1099, Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders. It was a brutal massacre. Around the Temple Mount, blood flowed ankle-deep. Newborn infants were thrown against walls. It wasn't just Muslims who knew the Crusaders’ wrath. A synagogue was torched, killing the Jews trapped inside. Some of the native Christians were also put to the sword. To this day, the wholesale slaughter of the First Crusade affects how Jews and Muslims perceive the Christian faith.But -- and this in no wise is meant to be a justification for the brutality of the Crusades; it seems just a tad hypocritical for Muslims to decry the atrocities of the Crusades when it was by the very same means they’d laid claim to the holy land in the 7th C. In truth, while crusading under the Christian cross is a horrible violation of the morality of Biblical Christianity—Jihad, Holy War is one of the main tenets of Islam. Long before the Pope erroneously offered absolution to Crusaders and the promise of heaven to those who died in the campaign, Islam promised paradise to Muslims who died in Jihad. Historically, while the Christian faith has spread by the work of humanitarian missionaries, Islam has spread by the sword. Or we might say, while true Christianity expands by the sword of the Spirit, Islam spreads by a sword of steel.Following the conquest of Jerusalem, the Crusaders carved out four states in the Middle East; the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Edessa.This First crusade was followed by eight more, none of them really able to accomplish the success of the first, if we can call it success. All told, the gains of the Crusades lasted less than 200 years. But one major accomplishment was the reopening of international trade between Europe and the Far East, something that had languished for a few hundred years.The Crusades have proven to be the focus of much historical study and debate. They’re usually linked to the political and social situation in 11th C Europe, the rise of a reform movement within the papacy, and the political and religious confrontation of Christianity and Islam in the Middle East. The Umayyad Caliphate had conquered Syria, Egypt, and North Africa from the predominantly Christian Byzantine Empire, and Spain from the Arian Christian Visigoths. When the Ummayads collapsed in North Africa, several smaller Muslim kingdoms emerged and attacked Italy in the 9th C. Pisa, Genoa, and Catalonia battled various Muslim kingdoms for control of the Mediterranean.The Crusaders were emboldened in their prospects for success in the Holy Land because of the successes they'd had in the Reconquista, the conquest of the Muslom Moors in the Iberian Peninsula. Earlier in the 11th C, French knights joined the Spanish in their campaign to retake their homeland. Shortly before the First Crusade, Pope Urban II encouraged the Spanish Christians to reconquer Tarragona, using much of the same symbolism and rhetoric he later used to preach Crusade to the people of Europe.Western Europe stabilized after the Saxons, Vikings, and Hungarians were brought into the Church by the end of the 10th C. But the demise of the Carolingian Empire gave rise to an entire class of warriors who had little to do but fight among themselves. The incessant warfare sapped Europe of its strength and wealth. Europe needed an external enemy they could turn their wrath on. As we saw in a previous episode, while the violence of knights was regularly condemned by the Church, and there was the attempt to regulate them in the treaties known as the Peace and Truce of God, the knights largely ignored these attempts at pacification. The Church needed an external threat they could direct the knights lust for battle toward.It was also at this time that the Popes were in constant competition with the Western emperors over the issue of investiture - the question of who had the authority to appoint bishops; the Church or the nobility. In some of the squabbles between Church and State, the popes weren't above calling out knights and nobles loyal to them to back down the power of the Emperor and recalcitrant nobles. So the Pope's mobilizing an armed force wasn't that far out of context.Another reason Pope Urban called for the First Crusade may have been his desire to assert control over the East. Remember that the Great Schism had occurred 40 years before and the churches had been rent ever since. While historians suggest this as one of several reasons driving Pope Urban’s decision to start the Crusade, there's no evidence from any of his letters this factored into his plans.Until the crusaders' arrival, the Byzantines had continually fought the Muslim Turks for control of Asia Minor and Syria. The Seljuks, Sunni Muslims, had at one time ruled the Great Seljuk Empire, but by the First Crusade it had divided into several smaller states at odds with each other. If the First Crusade and been waged just a decade before it would probably have been crushed by a united Seljuk force. But by the time they arrived in the Middle East, the Seljuks were at odds with each other.Egypt and most of Palestine was controlled by the Arab Shi'ite Fatimid Caliphate, which was far smaller since the arrival of the Seljuks. Warfare between the Fatimids and Seljuks caused great disruption for the local Christians and western pilgrims. The Fatimids lost Jerusalem to the Seljuks in 1073, then recaptured it in 1098 just before the arrival of the Crusaders.As I said at the outset of this episode, this is just a summary of the First Crusade. Because this is such a crucial moment in Church History, we'll come back to it in our next episode.As we end, I want to once again say, “Thanks” to all the kind comments and those who’ve given the CS Facebook page a like.Every so often I mention that CS is supporter solely by a few subscribers. You can probably tell the podcast is your typical sole-author, “guy, a mic, and a computer” arrangement. I’m so thankful for those who occasionally send in a donation to keep CS going.

This episode of CS is, “Crazy Stuff” because . . . we’ll you’ll see as we get into it.A short while back, we took at look at the Iconoclast Controversy that took place in the Eastern, Greek Orthodox church during the 8th & 9th Cs.While we understand the basic point of controversy between the icon-smashers, called iconoclasts, and the icon-supporters, the iconodules; the theology the iconodules used to support the on-going use of icons is somewhat complex.The iconoclasts considered the veneration of religious images as simple idolatry. The iconodules developed a theology that not only allowed, it encouraged the use of icons while avoiding the charge of idolatry. They said such images were to be respected; venerated even – but not worshiped. Though, for all practical purposes, in the minds of most worshipers, there was no real difference between veneration & the adoration of worship.The acceptance of icons as intrinsic to worship marked the entrance of a decidedly mystical slant that entered the Orthodox Church at this time, and has remained ever since. All of this was seen in the career of an author now known as PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS the Areopagite. He’s called Pseudo-Dionysius because while we know his writings were produced in the early 6th C in Syria, they claim to have been written by the 1st C Dionysius mentioned in Acts 17 who came to faith when Paul preached on the Mars Hill in Athens.Pseudo-Dionysius’ most famous works were titled The Divine Names, Mystical Theology, & The Celestial Hierarchy.  The Monophysite Christians of Alexandria were the first to draw inspiration from his work, supposing them to be genuine works of one of the Apostle Paul’s disciples. The Byzantines followed suit & incorporated some of his ideas. Then, in 649 when Pope Gregory I and the Lateran Council accepted them as dating to the 1st C, they became more widely looked to as informing Christian theology.Pseudo-Dionysius’ writings merged Christianity w/Neo-Platonism.  He saw the universe as divided into a hierarchy of spirits and believed the Church ought to be organized in a similar way as this spiritual hierarchy. Where Pseudo-Dionysius deviated from the Neo-Platonists was in his rejection of the idea that the goal of each human individual was to lose their individuality by re-uniting with the Creator. He went 180 degrees the other way and said it was the individual’s goal to grow through mystical moments of revelation so that the person emerged into a divine state; more god-like than human. Pseudo-Dionysius taught that these mystical moments were bursts of revelation that brought enlightenment and advanced the soul’s journey to a near-deity. But they weren’t moments of revelation INTO divine knowledge so much as they were a stripping away of it. While early cults like the Docetists & Gnostics had made the acquisition of secret knowledge that imparted enlightenment the hallmark of their creed, Pseudo-Dionysius said knowledge stood in the way of enlightenment. The mind was a barrier to spiritual advancement, not a tool to attain it. He claimed the path to salvation, which he cast as “spiritual fulfillment,” proceeded through 3 stages—Purification, Illumination, and Union.First, the seeker needed to strip him/herself of all earthly and fleshly entanglements. Then by extreme forms of meditation in which the goal was to wipe the mind clean, the special moment would arrive when the person would achieve illumination & realize their union with the divine. If this sounds a bit like Gnosticism and the esoteric offerings of Eastern religion, that’s because they are similar.This synthesis of Christianity & Neo-Platonist concepts had a huge impact on Byzantine theologies of mysticism and liturgy, on Western mystics, scholastics & Renaissance thinkers. Pseudo-Dionysius’ writings were translated from Greek into Latin about 850.They were rejected as inconsistent with the Bible by the Protestant Reformers and exposed as 6th Century forgeries when scholars dug into their origin. But their emphasis on the mystical had already done its damage in the Eastern Church which continued to hold onto many of Pseudo-Dionysius’ ideas. Even to this day, salvation in the Greek Orthodox Church means something rather different than it does in the Western Church, where it’s conceived as redemption from sin and reconciliation to God. In the Eastern Church, salvation is regarded as a return to a process of spiritual transformation enhanced by the Church; it’s priesthood, icons, and rituals, to a destiny that produces a being that is much more than human though not quite attaining to deity. The Eastern idea is that the Redeemed won’t be God, but will be certainly be god-like.Now, this is an over-simplification, but may help make THE crucial distinction between the ways the Western and Eastern Churches understand salvation. The West sees the work of Christ primarily as Salvation FROM sin, while the East understands it as Salvation TO glory.  Again—that’s a maybe gross reduction of the complex soteriology of the Eastern and Western theological traditions, but pretty accurate nonetheless. It’s all in where the emphasis is placed.The Bible does say Adam and Eve were created in God’s image. And we know Christ came to restore what they lost in the Fall. Certainly, the redeemed in glory will appear as glorious creatures that dwarf the shades humans are now. We are, as one musical artist sang – like ghosts on the earth, compared to the glory that was once Adam’s & will be ours yet again. But in Greek Orthodox theology, salvation seems to be not just a restoration of what was lost so much as a promotion into something new; something even more glorious than the first man and woman enjoyed. Again, something above human if not quite divine.And the emphasis on the mystical in the Eastern Church is all about how to make that leap, that spiritual form of evolutionary advance.In 650, as Pseudo-Dionysius’ views were being heavily imbibed in the East, a church leader named Constantine (obviously not the Emperor of the 4th C) resurrected some of the errors of the Gnostics. Constantine and his followers rejected the formal­ism of the Byzantine State church, claiming a desire to return to the simplicity of the Early Church.  We might respond; “Wait! In 650 they wanted to return to the dynamism of the early church? Isn’t THAT the early church?  That was 1400 years ago!”Constantine based his beliefs on the Gospels and letters of Paul alone. He claimed an evil deity inspired the rest of the NT and all the Old. In a reprise of Gnosticism, he claimed this evil deity was the creator and god of this world. The true God of heaven was opposed to the physical universe; that material world was unalterably evil. In order to save people's spirits from the wickedness of the physical world, the true God sent an angel who appeared as a man named Jesus.A little history taught church leaders how to shut down Constantine’s re-emergent Gnosticism. All they had to do was go back and read of the early church’s struggle with the Gnostics and how all these ideas were old hat with no basis in Scripture. While a few church leaders did just that and waged an apologetic battle with Constantine’s followers, the State Church persecuted & at times executed them.Constantine changed his name to Silas, one of the Apostle Paul’s associates. After Constantine-Silas was stoned to death, the next leader of the sect took the name Titus, another of Paul’s assistants. When he was burned to death, a third leader took the name Timothy. The next adopted the name Tychicus. All this lead to the sect being called the Paulicians.During the Iconoclast Contro­versy of the 8th C, the persecution of the Paulicians eased a bit. One of the Emperors may even have been a Paulician. But in the 9th C, the Empress Theodora ordered the Paulicians eradicated. Tens of thousands were killed, most in Armenia.In reaction, the Paulicians formed armies which proved quite capable in battle. So, unable to conquer them outright, the Byzantines offered them independence if they’d move to the troubled border w/the Slavs & Bulgars giving the Empire grief.The Paulicians ended up having a major religious impact on the Bulgars. These Bulgar-Paulicians became known as the Bogomils¸ named after their first leader. In the mid 10th C he taught that the first-born son of God was Satan. Because of Satan’s pride, he was expelled from heaven. God then made a new heaven and earth, in which he placed Adam and Eve. Satan had sex with Eve which union produced Cain, the source of all evil among humans. Moses and John the Baptist, according to the Bogomils, were both servants of Satan. But God sent the Logos, his second Son, Jesus to save humanity from the control of Satan. Although Satan killed Jesus, his spiritual body was resurrected and returned to the right hand of God. Satan was in this way defeated; or so said Bogomilism.Some of our listeners may find all of this similar to another religious group headquartered today in a certain State of the US, that has great skiing during the winter and a capital located next to a large, salty inland sea. Turns out, Solomon was right; there really isn’t anything new under the sun.The Bogomils adopted a rigidly ascetic life-style. They despised marriage, although they permitted it in the case of less-than-perfect believers. They condemned the eating of meat and the consumption of wine. They rejected baptism and communion as Satanic rituals  since they used material things.Bogomilism flourished in Bul­garia while it was an independent country in the 10th C, then again in the 13th. Bogomilian ideas spread to Western Europe where they influenced the Cathars and Albigensians. When the Turks destroyed the Bulgarian Empire in 1393, the Bogomils disappeared.The Paulicians continued in minor enclaves in Armenia all the way into the 19th C. It’s possible that in some tiny corner of rural communities, Paulicianism continues to find adherents.And now you see why I chose to title this episode, “Crazy Stuff.”

This episode of Communio Sanctorum is titled, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”In our study of the History of the Church, we get to examine some periods when the followers of Jesus did some amazing, God-honoring, Christ-exalting, people-blessing things. In future episodes, we’ll take a longer look at how the Gospel has impacted history and world civilization for the better.But, we have to be honest and admit there have been too many times when the Church totally fumbled the ball. Worse than that, after fumbling, they stepped on and kicked it out of bounds!The danger I face as we deal with these atrocious moments in Church History is of being assumed to be hostile to the Body of Christ. When I speak about the abysmal career of some of the popes, some listeners assume I’m Catholic-bashing. Later, when we get to the Reformation era and take a look at some of the Reformers, I’ll be accused of being a closet-Catholic!So I want to pause here and say à This isn’t a podcast about me, but I need to use me as an example . . .As most of you know, I’m a non-denominational Evangelical pastor. I’m not a scholar, not even close. I’m just a guy who loves history and decided to share what he was learning about the history of the church with others because at the time CS began, there just wasn’t a short-format church history podcast available. While I genuinely try to be unbiased in presenting the story of the Church, it’s inevitable I’ll slant the narrative at points. I’ve already made it clear that when I do offer mere opinion, I’ll preface it with a warning, but infrequent side comments can still color the material. Even what adjectives I pick reveal bias.While I aim to be faithful in my own walk with God, my role in my family as a husband and father, and my calling as a pastor, I freely admit I’m still a man in process. I have many faults and a long way to go to be conformed to Christ’s image. Keenly aware of how far I have to go is what causes me to wonder how God could use me! Yet use me He does, week after week, in my role as pastor. I’m such a flawed vessel, yet God keeps pouring His grace thru me. It’s humbling.The point is this: While so much of Church History is flat-out embarrassing, God still uses the Church, still works by His Spirit through His people to accomplish His purposes. So when we see the Church stumble, regardless of what group it is, what era, what label is applied to those who mess up, let’s not white-wash, edit, or redact. Let’s tell it like it is; own it as part of our history, but remember that while man fails, God never does.From the late 9th to 10th C the position of Roman bishop once held by such godly men as Popes Leo and Gregory was turned over to a parade of corrupt nobles who were anything but.This was a time when the position of the pope was a plum political appointment, with the potential of gaining great wealth and power for the pope’s family.  The intrigue surrounding the selection of the pope was vast and nefarious. An Italian heiress named Marozia [mah-RO-zee-ah], controlled the bishop’s seat at Rome for 60 years. She was one bishop's mother, another's murderer and a third’s mistress.  In what just about everyone recognizes as a low point for the Papacy, Octavianus, Marozia’s grandson, celebrated his impending election as Pope John XII, by toasting the devil. Once in office, his behavior was far from saintly. The immorality that attended his term was legendary. Corruption of the office didn’t end with his death. Reform was desperately needed and many called for it. But one man’s reform is another’s loss of power and access to wealth.Though the Western and Eastern halves of the Church had quarreled for centuries over minor doctrinal issues and who ought to lead the Church, they still saw themselves as one Body. That unity was doomed by many years of contention and the fragmenting of the world into conflicted regions brought about by the dissolving of the Roman Empire and constant invasion of outsiders. The emergence of Islam in the 7th C accelerated the break between East and West. We might assume the 2 halves of the old Empire would unite in face of the Islamic threat, and there were times when that seemed hopeful. But the reality was, Islam presented a threat across such a huge front, the various regions of Christendom ended up having to face the threat on their own.Between the 9th and 13th Cs, three separate challenges split Christianity into 2 disparate camps. Like taps on a diamond, each furthered the emerging rift until finally the break came.The first tap had to do with the Nicene Creed hammered out at the Council of Nicea all the way back in the early 4th C when Constantine was Emperor. In the 9th C, the Nicene Creed still stood as the standard formulation for how Christians in the East and West understood God. But the Spanish church added something they thought would make the creed clearer. The original creed stated, “The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.” The revised creed of the Spanish church said, “The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.”This reflected the work on the Trinity that had been conducted by later Councils. Remember, the very first councils were consumed with understanding the nature of Jesus and settled on the doctrine He is both fully God and fully Man. They labored hard to find just the right words to say that. Then, they turned their attention to the issue of the Trinity, and after much labor settled on the wording that God is one in essence but three in person.  For most people, that was enough, but theologians have minds that want to go further. They debated over how to understand the divinity of God. Who actually possessed deity; all three equally? Or did one possess it, then shared it with the others?The Western Church centered held the idea divinity was co-equal and underived in Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But relationally the Son proceeds from the Father, and the Holy Spirit then proceeds from both Father and Son. This seemed to accurately reflect the subordinate missions assigned the 2nd and 3rd members of the Trinity in the Bible.The Western Church adopted the revised Nicene Creed. The Eastern Church balked! Everyone agreed the Nicene Creed had been a work of the Spirit of God illuminating the minds of the Council to the Word of God. It was inviolable! How could Rome think to fiddle with it? And especially without consulting them? Why, at the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, the Bishops committed themselves never to change the creed.According to Eastern theologians, divinity dwelt only in the Father. The Father then shared the divine being with the Son and Spirit. They could not say the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son.” If the Spirit arose from "the Father and the Son," the Son would possess divine being co-equally with the Father.While there had been potential doctrinal rifts before, the East and West had always been able to reach a consensus. That historic consensus became increasingly distant as this debate, known as the Filioque Controversy, raged. Filioque is Latin for “and the Son.”In 867 Photius, bishop of Constantinople formally denounced the added phrase. Five years later, Pope Adrian II offered to drop the phrase “and the Son” from the Nicene Creed. Rome would drop the Filioque clause if the Eastern church accepted the Pope's supremacy over the Church. Photius declined. >> Tap 1.Get ready for Tap 2 …One day in AD 1048, three shoeless pilgrims—Bruno, Humbert, and Hildebrand walked together through the gates of Rome. Each in his own way would transform the Roman church.Bruno was elected Pope Leo IX. He immediately set about reforming the Roman church morally and theologically.  To keep priests from passing ecclesiastical positions to their children, he demanded celibacy. Next, he moved to extricate the Church from secular entanglements and obligations to European nobility. Bruno and his successor popes really believed God had given them authority over all Christians.The new bishop of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, refused to recognize Bruno as Pope. He closed every church in Constantinople loyal to Rome. Bruno then sent envoys to Constantinople to negotiate peace. His chief envoy was his friend Humbert. Before leaving Rome, Humbert wrote a bold notice in the Pope’s name. This official church notice is called a bull. We get our word “bulletin” from it. A Bull was an authoritative announcement of intention to follow a particular course. It’s based in the authority of the person who writes it or whose name it bears.Humbert made the journey from Rome to Constantinople, bull in hand. He arrived on July 16, 1054, marched into the Hagia Sophia while Communion was being observed. As one author says, Humbert’s notice was a lot like a Texas longhorn: It had a point here, a point there, and a lot of bull in between. Condemned in the bull were the Eastern practices of allowing priests to marry, refusing to recognize baptism performed in Roman churches, and deleting the Filioque.For the record, the Roman church had allowed priests to marry for several centuries, the Eastern church did not refuse to recognize Roman baptism, and they absolutely did NOT DELETE the phrase” and the son” from the Creed – The Western Church had added it!Humbert threw the bull on the Communion table, turned his back on the priest, and walked out, knocking the dust from his sandals and yelling "Let God judge!" A deacon picked up the bull and chased after Humbert, begging him to take it back. Humbert refused.The Papal Bull was viewed by the Eastern Church as the proverbial gauntlet, thrown at their feet by the Pope. The options seemed clear; either submit to the Pope’s undisputed authority over the Church, or be considered by Rome a breakaway church.Tap 2The third and decisive tap that sundered East from West was the Crusades, specifically, the 4th. I need to make clear we’re only dipping a toe into the subject of the Crusades for now. They’re a major part of Church History we’ll spend a lot more time on in future episodes. For now, we’re only looking at how the Crusades served to split the Western and Eastern Churches.But even before THAT, I’m compelled to remind everyone that when I refer to the Eastern Church, what I really mean is the Greek Orthodox or Byzantine Church; not the Church of the East we’ve looked at in earlier podcasts. For simplicity sake. Picture a map of the ancient world; that swath of the globe that includes to the far left, Spain and Northwest Africa, up thru England and Scotland. Now, put the Middle East with Mesopotamia in the center of that mental map, and at the far right, China and Japan.Now, draw a mental oval over Spain, the British Isles, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia; shade it blue – That’s the Western Church, speaking Latin, and centered at Rome under the Popes.Next, draw another oval over all East Europe and West Asia; shade it Green – That’s the Byzantine Church, speaking Greek and centered at Constantinople under the Patriarchs.Finally, draw a 3rd oval over The Middle East, Mesopotamia, Persia, Central Asia, India, China and all the way to Japan. Shade it red – That’s the Nestorian Church of the East, that speaks mainly Syriac and is headquartered at Nisibis & Edessa under the leadership of the Metropolitans.Note how much larger that 3rd sphere is. It covers a territory and population much larger than the two to its west combined. Yet in the popular review of Church History, this Church of the East is often neglected. The reason for that neglect is a subject for a later episode.My point here is that when we speak of the break between the Eastern and Western Churches, let’s be sure we understand that the description of the Byzantine Church as the Eastern Church isn’t really accurate. It’s only a description of the Byzantine Church as being to the geographic East of the Western, Latin Church.Now, back to our look at the 3rd tap that severed West from East . . .As we’ve seen in previous episodes, penance played a major role in the religious life of Medieval Christians. Many believed they could prove themselves worthy of God’s favor by going on a “pilgrimage.” So pilgrims traveled to shrines containing the bones of saints and relics from the Biblical story.  European cathedrals were centers where these sacred items were kept. But the greatest pilgrimage of all, one taken by not a few sincere believers was to Jerusalem. Even today with modern forms of transportation, a trip to Israel is a major event requiring special arrangements and a significant investment. Imagine what it meant for a pilgrim of the 10th or 11th C!  They walked hundreds of miles, braved a risky voyage aboard a ship that traveled through stormy, pirate-infested seas. This was no Disneyland ride; there were real-deal pirates who’d slit your throat or sell you into slavery. Fun stuff.Pilgrimages became such a fixture of medieval society, to impede a pilgrim's journey was thought to imperil his/her salvation. So a whole trade developed in assisting pilgrims reaching their destination, whether it was some cathedral or holy shrine in Europe, or the great pilgrimage to the Holy Land.From AD 638, Muslims controlled Jerusalem and the routes leading there. They required pilgrims to pay special fees. So in 1095 in France, Pope Urban II responded by preaching one of history's most influential sermons. We’ll go into the details later. For now, just know he said, “Your Eastern brothers have asked for your help! Turks and Arabs have conquered their territories. I or, rather, the Lord begs you … destroy that vile race from your brothers’ lands!”The response astounded both the Pope and Europe’s nobility. The crowd of commoners began to chant, “Deus vult = God wills it!” There was an immediate response of hundreds to go in relief of their imperiled brothers.  As the days passed, the fervor spread and soon, nobles and serfs set off on the Great Pilgrimage to liberate Jerusalem from the infidels. They sewed crosses onto their tunics and painted them on their shields. Nobles forged new swords and spears while commoners grabbed whatever might make for a weapon and set off. They agreed to gather in Constantinople. The First Crusade was off and running.Among the peasants that set out on the 1st Crusade was a large group who followed a monk known as Peter the Hermit. The swarthy monk had not bathed in decades. He rode a burro that, according to some bore a remarkable resemblance to its rider. Peter's preaching was even more powerful than his odor. In 9 months, he gathered 20,000 European peasants to fight the Eastern infidel. They caused immediate chaos when they arrived in Constantinople. Complaints of robbery poured into the Emperor's office. He knew the untrained peasants were no match for the Muslims who cut their teeth on conquest, but he couldn't let them linger in his city. So he ferried them across the river where they began pillaging the homes of Eastern Christians, straining relations between the Byzantine and Roman churches. 2 months later, these peasants marched straight into an ambush. Peter, still in Constantinople begging for supplies, was the lone survivor. He joined another army, led by European nobility. These Crusaders clashed with the Muslims in Antioch, then continued on to Jerusalem.On July 15, 1099, Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders. Near the Temple Mount, the blood flowed ankle-deep. Newborns were thrown against walls. Crusaders torched a synagogue and burned the Jews inside alive. To this day, this wholesale slaughter affects how Jews and Muslims perceive the Church.A couple more Crusader campaigns were launched, then in 1198 a noble became Pope Innocent III. He inspired the 4th Crusade that would finally divide the Byzantine and Roman Churches.The bottom line of the 4th Crusade is that it was more than anything, a commercial venture. The merchants of the powerful city-state of Venice agreed to supply the Crusaders with ships at the cost of 84,000 silver coins. They were then to sail to Egypt and destroy a key Muslim base that would open up trade.  In the summer of 1202, the Crusaders arrived in Venice expecting to sail to Egypt. But there was a problem: Only one-third of the expected number of Crusaders showed up, and they came up with only 50,000 silver coins.Not to worry, an ambitious Eastern prince who fancied himself someone who deserved a fate and station better than the one life had dealt him, offered to finance the crusade à get this: Under the condition the Crusaders sail to Constantinople FIRST and dethrone the current Emperor. Once that was done, they could be on their merry way. Pope Innocent III forbade the assault on Constantinople, but no one paid him any mind. On July 5, 1203, the Crusaders arrived in Constantinople. But the people of the city were quite over the mess these Europeans kept making of things and revolted. They pre-empted the Crusaders attempt to install their own emperor and instead selected a fiercely anti-Crusader ruler.The Crusaders were furious. They’d set out to destroy Muslims in Egypt and saw their side trip to Constantinople as a brief diversion. Now, they were stranded in the Eastern Capital. With the promise of plunder the motive for their venture in the first place, they decided to go to town on those they now deemed their enemies – the people and city of Constantinople. One priest promised the Crusaders if they died in the now “holy cause” of sacking the city, they had the Pope’s blessing and would go immediately to heaven. The Pope had said no such thing; on the contrary, he’d forbidden the entire campaign. But people hear what they want, and the Crusaders took that priest’s announcement as a license to do whatever they pleased.On Good Friday, 1204, with red crosses on their tunics, the Crusaders sacked Constantinople. For 3 days, they raped and killed fellow believers. The city's statues were hacked to pieces and melted down. The Hagia Sophia was stripped of its treasures. A harlot performed sensual dances on the Lord's Table, singing vile drinking songs. One writer lamented that the Muslims were more merciful than those who bore a cross on their garments.Neither the Byzantine Empire nor Church recovered from those 3 horrible days. The Crusaders ruled the Eastern Empire for the next 60 years. The Eastern emperor set up a new capital in nearby Nicaea, to which many of the people of Constantinople fled.  They remained there until 1261, when an Eastern ruler retook the City.Pope Innocent III tried to prevent the fall of Constantinople, but no one had listened. Afterward, he attempted to reunite the churches, but it was too late. After the 4th Crusade, the Church was shattered into 2 communions. Today we know them as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.And while there have been a few attempts to affect a reconciliation recently, the wight of history has served to keep them at odds.

This episode is titled Icons.Those with a rough outline of history know we’re coming up on that moment when the Eastern and Western branches of the Church split. The break wasn’t some incidental accident that happened without a lot of preparation. Things had been going sour for a long time. One of the contributing factors was the Iconoclast Controversy that split the Byzantine church in the 8th and 9th Cs.While the Western Church went through monumental changes during the Middle Ages, the Eastern Church centered at Constantinople pretty much managed a holding pattern. It was the preservation of what they considered orthodoxy that moved Eastern Christians to view the Western Church as making dangerous and sometimes even heretical alterations to the Faith. The Eastern Church thought itself to now be alone in carrying the Faith of the Ecumenical Councils into the future. And for that reason, Constantinople backed away from its long-stated recognition that the Church at Rome was pre-eminent in Church affairs.Another factor contributing to the eventual sundering of East from West was the musical chairs played for the Western Emperor while in the East, the Emperor was far more stable. Remember that while the Western Roman Empire was effectively dead by the late 5th Century, the Eastern Empire continued to identify itself as Roman for another thousand years, though historians now refer to it as the Byzantine Empire.  At Constantinople, the Emperor was still the Roman Emperor, and like Constantine, the de-facto head of the Church. He was deemed by the Eastern Church as “the living image of Christ.”But that was about to experience a major re-model in the brueha between the iconoclasts and iconodules; terms we’ll define a bit later.The most significant controversy to trouble the Byzantine church during the European Middle Ages was over the use of religious images known as icons. That’s the way many modern historians regard what’s called the Iconoclast Controversy – as a debate over the use of icons. But as usual, the issue went deeper. It arose over the question of what it meant when we say something is “holy”.The Church was divided over the question of what things were sufficiently sacred as to deserve worship. Priests were set apart by ordination; meaning they’d been consecrated to holy work. Church buildings were set apart by dedication; they were sacred. The martyrs were set apart by their deeds; that’s why they were called “saints” meaning set-apart ones. And if martyrs were saints by virtue of giving their lives in death, what about the monks who gave their lives à yet still lived? Weren’t they worthy of the same kind of honor?If all these people, places and things were holy, were they then worthy of special veneration?The holiness of the saints was endorsed and demonstrated by miracles, not just attributed to them while they lived, but also reported in connection with their tombs, relics; even images representing them. By the beginning of the 7th C, many cities had a local saint whose icons were revered as having special powers of intercession and protection. Notable examples were Saint Demetrius of Thessalonica, the Christ-icon of Edessa, and the miracle-working icon of Mary of Constantinople.From the 6th C, both Church and govern­ment encouraged religious devotion to monks and icons. Most Christians failed to distin­guish between the object or person and the spiritual reality they stood for. They fell into, what many regarded as the dreaded sin of idolatry. But before we rush to judgment, let’s take a little time to understand how they slipped into something Scripture clearly bans.The use of images as help to religious devotion had strong precedent. In pagan Rome, the image of the Emperor was revered as if the Emperor himself were present. Even images of lesser imperial officials were occasionally used as stand-ins for those they represented. After emper­ors became Christians, the imperial image on coins, in court-houses, and in the most prominent places in the major cities continued to be an object of veneration and devotion. Constantine and his successors erected large statues of them­selves, the remains of which are on display today. It was Justinian I who broke with tradition and instead erected a huge icon of Christ over the main gate of the palace at Constantinople. During the following century icons of Christ and Mary came to replace the imperial icon in many settings. Eventually under Justinian II in the early 8th C, the icon of Christ began to appear on coins.While the use of images as accouterments to facilitate worship was generally accepted, there were those who considered such practice contrary to the Bible’s clear prohibition of idolatry. They weren’t against religious art per se; only it’s elevation into what they considered the realm of worship.The debate over icons was really a kind of doctrinal epilogue to the Christological controversies of an earlier time. àWhat was proper in depicting Christ and other Biblical persons? Can Jesus even be represented, or is the attempt to a violation of His divinity? Does making an image of Jesus enforce his humanity at the expense of his deity?And when does art, used in the service of worship, to enhance or facilitate it, interfere with worship because the object or image becomes the focal point?Though these questions may seem distant to those who hail from a modern Evangelical background, they may be able to get in touch with the challenge the Eastern Church of the 8th and 9th Cs faced by remembering back a little way to when some notable worship leaders raised concern about the modern worship scene with its fostering an environment of overblown emotionalism. Some phrased it as the “Worship of worship,” rather than God. Musical productions and concerts became events people turned out by the thousands for as they sought a spiritual thrill, a worship-high. One well-known composer of modern worship wrote a song that aimed to expose this trend called “The Heart of Worship.”Though the medium was different, in some ways, the recent worship of worship concern was similar to the concern of the Byzantine iconoclasts. In the ancient Eastern Church, the medium was the art of images. The more recent controversy centered on the art of music.By the 7th C, the most significant form of Eastern devotion was the cult of holy icons. While I could give a more technical definition or description of icons, let me keep it simple and say they were highly-stylized paintings made on wood. The images were of Jesus, Mary, saints, and angels. While there were primitive images used by Christians all the way back in the 1st C, we’d have to say Christian art began in earnest in the 3rd C. It was used either decoratively or depicted scenes from the Bible as a way to instruct illiterate believers.As mentioned, since the people of the Eastern Empire were already accustomed to showing deference to portraits of the Emperor, it wasn’t much of a stretch to apply this to pictures of what were considered holy people. Since imperial portraits were often set off by draperies, people prostrated before them, burned incense and lit candles beside them, and carried them in solemn processions, it seemed inevitable that icons of the saints would receive the same treatment. The first Christian images known to have been surrounded by such veneration occurred in the 5th C. The practice became widely popular in the 6th and 7th. The reserve church leaders like Epiphanius and Augustine had shown toward the use of images at the end of the 4th C disappeared.It’s important to realize that when it comes to icons and their use, there were really two tracks. One track was the way theologians justified or condemned them. The second track was that of the common people who had little interest in the fine points of theology involved in their use. The iconoclasts framed the issue from Track 2. They were skeptical of the illiterate masses being able to make a distinction between simply using an icon as a means to worship of what the image represented, and actual worship of the image itself. What seemed to prove their point was when some of these icons and religious relics were attributed with special powers to effect healing and work wonders.Pro-icon Church leaders maintained a misunderstanding of icons ought not prohibit their use. That would err into mere pragmatism.Emperor Leo III launched an attack on the use of icons in the first half of the 8th C. He was motivated by a concern the Church was engaging in the forbidden practice of idolatry, the very thing that had coast ancient Israel so much trouble. Perhaps the Eastern Empire’s humiliating losses over the previous century, as well as a terrible earthquake early in Leo's reign, were evidence of divine judgment. If so, Leo was concerned the Empire would awaken to their peril, repent and amend their ways.Of course, Leo didn’t come up with this on his own or out of the blue. There were many among the clergy and common people who questioned the use of icons as objects of religious devotion. But now with the Emperor’s backing, this group of Iconoclasts, as they were called, became more vocal. Antagon­ism toward the use of icons grew, especially along the eastern frontier that bordered Muslims lands. Muslims had long called Christians idolaters for their use of religious images. Leo grew up in that region and had served as governor of western Asia Minor among several iconoclast bishops.The word iconoclast means a breaker or destroyer of icons because eventually, that’s what the Iconoclasts will do; smash, break and burn the icons.After successfully repulsing the Muslim armies in their 2nd attack on Constantinople in 717, Emperor Leo III openly declared his opposition to icons for the 1st time. He ordered the icon of Christ over the Imperial Gate to be replaced with a cross. In spite of wide-spread rioting, in 730 Leo called for the removal and destruction of all religious icons in public places and churches.  The iconodules, as supporters of icons were called, were perse­cuted.In Rome, Pope Gregory III condemned the destruction of icons. The Emperor retaliated by removing Sicily, southern Italy and the entire western part of the Balkans and Greece from Rome’s ecclesiastical oversight, placing them under the Patriarchate of Constantinople. It was this, as much as anything, that moved the Pope to seek the support and protection of the Franks.Leo’s son Constantine V not only continued his father’s iconoclastic policy, he furthered it. He convened a council in 754 at the imperial palace at Hiereia, a suburb of Constantinople. The iconoclasts regarded it as the 7th Ecumenical Council, though it was only the Patriarchate of Constantinople that attended.Both iconoclasts and iconodules agreed that the divine in Jesus Christ could not be represented in pictures, but Jesus had 2 natures. The iconoclasts argued that to represent the human nature was to lapse into the dreaded Nestorianism but to represent both natures was to go against their distinction, which was the error of Monophysitism, and made an image of deity.The iconodules replied that not to represent Jesus Christ was Monophysitism.Note how these arguments illustrate the practice of debating new issues in terms of already condemned errors.Against pictures of Mary and the saints, the iconoclasts reasoned that one cannot depict their virtues, so pictures were at best a vanity unworthy of the memory of the person represented. “Surely,” they said, “Mary and the saints would not WANT such images made!”Other arguments by the iconoclasts were that the only true image of Jesus Christ is the Eucharist.Supporters of icons used arguments that were most effectively articulated by John of Damascus, an Arab Christian who wrote in Greek. John was a monk at the monastery of St. Saba in Palestine where he became a priest and devoted himself to study of the Scripture and literary work. Being outside the realm of Byzantine control, he was safe from retaliation by the Emperor and iconoclastic officials.John of Damascus was the most systematic and comprehensive theologian in the Greek church since Origen. His most important work is the Fountain of Knowledge, part three of which, titled On the Orthodox Faith, gives an excellent summary of the teaching of the Greek Fathers on the principal Christian doctrines. He also produced homilies, hymns, and a commentary on the NT letters of Paul. John of Damascus’s Three Apologies against Those Who Attack the Divine Images took a fourfold approach to the issue.1st he said, it’s simultaneously impossible and impious to picture God, Who is pure spirit. Jesus Christ, Mary, saints, and angels on the other hand, who’ve appeared to human beings may be depicted. The Bible forbids idols alone.2nd, it’s permissible to make images. The Old Testament prohibition of images was not absolute, for some images were commanded to be made; take for instance the cherubim over the mercy seat and other adornments of the temple. John said that we’re not under the strictures of the Old Covenant now. In fact, the incarnation of God IN Christ prompts us to make the invisible, visible. John set the incarnation at the center of his defense of icons, elevating the debate from a question only of practices of piety to a matter of theological orthodoxy. Since human beings are created with body and soul, the physical senses are important in human knowledge of the divine. There are images everywhere— human beings are images of God. The tradition of the Church allows images, and this suffices even without Scriptural warrant, he argued.3rd, it’s lawful to venerate icons and images because matter isn’t evil. There are different kinds of worship: true worship belongs to God alone, but honor may be given to others.4th, there are advantages to images and their veneration. They teach and recall divine gifts, nourish piety, and become channels of grace.John of Damascus is regarded by the Orthodox Church as the last of the great teachers of the early church, men universally referred to as the “Church Fathers.”Despite his arguments, Iconoclast emperors drove iconodules from positions of power and began vigorous persecution. Many works of art in church buildings from before the 8th C were destroyed. Constantine V took strong measures against monks, the chief spokesmen for images, secularizing their property and forcing them to marry nuns. Many of them fled to the West.The Popes watched all of this with interest and came in on the side of the iconodules. Some of the best formulations of the independence of the Church, arguing that the emperor was not a teacher of the church, were made in their letters.In the end, the iconoclasts sealed their defeat by refusing to give to pictures of Jesus the reverence they gave pictures of the Emperor. The reaction against iconoclasm finally set in after Constantine V.Constantine V's son and successor, Leo IV, was not an energetic iconoclast as his father and grandfather. His widow Irene, regent for their son Constantine VI, over­turned the dynasty's iconoclastic policy. At her bidding the Council of Nicaea in 787 and condemned the Iconoclasts, affirming the theological position taken by John of Damascus.They found, “The venerable and holy images, as well in painting and mosaic as of other fit materials . . . should be given due salutation and honorable reverence, not indeed that true worship of faith that pertains alone to the divine nature”But that wasn’t the end of iconoclasm. An Iconoclast block developed in the profes­sional military as a reaction to a series of military disasters, diplomatic humiliations, and economic problems the Empire experienced in the quarter-century after the 787 Nicaean Council. They interpreted all these set-backs as the judgment of God for the Empire’s return to idolatry.Finally, Emperor Leo V decided that Iconoclasm should again become the official policy of his government. A synod of church leaders in 815 reaffirmed the position taken by the anti-icon synod of 754—except that they no longer regarded the icons as idols.With Leo V's death, active persecution of the pro-icon party declined for 17 years before bursting out again in 837 under the leadership of Patriarch John Grammaticus. Under his influence, Emperor Theophilus decreed exile or capital punishment for all who openly supported the use of icons.Theodora, the widow of Theophilus and regent for their son Michael III, decided he ought to abandon the iconoclastic policy to retain the widest support for his rule. A synod early in 843 condemned all iconoclasts, deposed the iconoclastic Patriarch John Grammaticus, and confirmed the decrees of the 7th Council.In today's Eastern Orthodox churches, paintings and mosaics frequently fill spaces on ceilings and walls. A screen or low partition called the iconostasis stretches across the front of the church, between the congregation and the altar area, for the purpose of displaying all the special icons pertaining to the liturgy and holy days.

The title of this episode is “What a Mess!”As is often the case, we start by backing up & reviewing material we’ve already covered so we can launch into the next leg of our journey in Church History.Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany had received the support of Charles Martel, a founder of the Carolin­gian dynasty. Martel supported these missions because of his desire to expand his rule eastwards into Bavaria. The Pope was grateful for his sup­port, and for Charles' victory over the Muslims at the Battle of Tours. But Martel fell afoul of papal favor when he confiscated Church lands. At first, the Church consented to his seizing of property to produce income to stave off the Muslim threat. But once that threat was dealt with, he refused to return the lands. Adding insult to injury, Martel ignored the Pope’s request for help against the Lombards taking control of a good chunk of Italy. Martel denied assistance because at that time the Lombards were his allies. But a new era began with the reign of Martel's heir, Pippin or as he’s better known, Pepin III.Pepin was raised in the monastery of St. Denis near Paris. He & his brother were helped by the church leader Boniface to carry out a major reform of the Frank church. These reforms of the clergy and church organization brought about a renewal of religious and intellectual life and made possible the educational revival associated with the greatest of the Carolingian rulers, Charlemagne & his Renaissance.In 751, Pepin persuaded Pope Zachary to allow Boniface to anoint him, King of the Franks, supplanting the Merovingian dynasty. Then, another milestone in church-state relations passed with Pope Stephen II appealing to Pepin for aid against the Lombards. The pope placed Rome under the protection of Pepin and recognized him and his sons as “Protectors of the Romans.”As we’ve recently seen, all of this Church-State alliance came to a focal point with the crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in AD 800. For some time the Popes in Rome had been looking for a way to loosen their ties to the Eastern Empire & Constantinople. Religious developments in the East provided the Popes an opportunity to finally break free. The Iconoclastic Controversy dominating Eastern affairs gave the Popes one more thing to express their disaffection with. We’ll take a closer look at the controversy later. For now, it’s enough to say the Eastern Emperor Leo III banned the use of icons as images of religious devotion in AD 726. The supporters of icons ultimately prevailed but only after a century of bitter and at times violent dispute. Pope Gregory II rejected Leo’s edict banning icons and flaunted his disrespect for the Emperor's authority. Gregory's pompous and scathing letter to the Emperor was long on bluff but a dramatic state­ment of his rejection of secular rulers’ meddling in Church affairs. Pope Gregory wrote: “Listen! Dogmas are not the business of emperors but of pontiffs.”The reign of what was regarded by the West as a heretical dynasty in the East gave the Pope the excuse he needed to separate from the East and find a new, devoted and orthodox protector. The alliance between the papacy and the Carolingians represents the culmination of that quest, and opened a new and momentous chapter in the history of European medieval Christianity.In response to Pope Stephen's appeal for help against the Lombards, Pepin recovered the Church’s territories in Italy and gave them to the pope, an action known as the 'Donation of Pepin'. This confirmed the legal status of the Papal States.At about the same time, the Pope's claim to the rule of Italy and independence from the Eastern Roman Empire was reinforced by the appearance of one of the great forgeries of the Middle Ages, the Donation of Constantine. This spurious document claimed Constantine the Great had given Rome and the western part of the Empire to the bishop of Rome when he moved the capital of the empire to the East. The Donation was not exposed as a forgery until the 15th Century.The concluding act in the popes’ attempt to free themselves from Constantinople came on Christmas Day 800 when Pope Leo III revived the Empire in the West by crowning Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor. It’s rather humorous, as one wag put it – the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, and can scarcely be called an Empire.Charlemagne’s chief scholar was the British-born Alcuin who’d been master of the cathedral school in York. He was courted by Charlemagne to make his capital at Aachen on the border between France & Germany, Europe’s new center of education & scholarship. Alcuin did just that. If the school at Aachen didn’t plant the seeds that would later flower in the Renaissance it certainly prepared the soil for them.Alcuin profoundly influenced the intellectual, cultural and religious direction of the Carolingian Empire, as the 300-some extant let­ters he wrote reveal. His influence is best seen in the manuscripts of the school at Tours where he later became abbot. His influence is also demonstrated in his educational writings, revision of the Biblical text, commentaries and the completion of his version of Church liturgy. He standardized spelling and writing, reformed missionary practice, and contributed to the organizing of church regulations. Alcuin was the leading theologian in the struggle against the heresy of Adoptionism. Adoptionists said Jesus was simply a human being who God adopted & MADE a Son. Alcuin was a staunch defender of Christian orthodoxy and the authority of the Church, the pre-eminence of the Roman Bishop and of Charlemagne's sacred position as Emperor. He died in 804.The time at which Alcuin lived certainly needed the reforms he brought & he was the perfect agent to bring them. From the palace school at Aachen, a generation of his students went out to head monas­tic and cathedral schools through­out the land. Even though Charlemagne’s Empire barely outlived its founder, the revival of education and religion associated with he and Alcuin brightened European culture throughout the bleak and chaotic period that followed. This Carolingian Renaissance turned to classical antiquity and early Christianity for its models. The problem is, there was only one Western scholar who still knew Greek, the Irishman John Scotus Erigena. Still, the manuscripts produced during this era form the base from which modern historians gain a picture of the past. It was these classical texts, translated from Greek into Latin that fueled the later European Renaissance.The intellectual vigor stimulated by the Carolingian Renaissance and the political dynamism of the revived Empire stimulated new theologi­cal activity. There was discussion about the continuing Iconoclastic problem in the East. Political antagonism between the Eastern and the Carolingian emperors led to an attack by theologians in the West on the practices and beliefs of the Orthodox Church in the East. These controversial works on the 'Errors of the Greeks' flourished during the 9th C as a result of the Photian Schism.In 858, Byzantine Emperor Michael III deposed the Patriarch Ignatius I of Constantinople, replacing him with a lay scholar named Photius I, AKA Photius the Great. The now deposed Ignatius appealed to Pope Nicholas I to restore him while Photius asked the Pope to recognize his appointment. The Pope ordered the restoration of Ignatius & relations between East & West sunk further. The issue ended in 867 when Pope Nicholas died & Photius was deposed.Latin theologians also criticized the Eastern church for its different method of deciding the date of Easter, the difference in the way clergy cut their hair, and the celibacy of priests. The Eastern Church allowed priests to marry while requiring monks to be celibate, whereas the Western Church required celibacy of both.Another major doctrinal debate was the Filioque [Filly-o-quay] Controversy we briefly touched on in an earlier episode. Now, before I get a barrage of emails, there’s debate among scholars over the pronunciation of Filioque. Some say “Filly-oak” others “Filly-o-quay.” Take your pick.The point is, the Controversy dealt with the wording of the Nicene Creed as related to the Holy Spirit. The original Creed said the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father. A bit later, the Western Church altered the wording a bit so as to affirm the equality of the Son of God with the Father. So they said the Spirit proceeded from both Father & Son. Filioque is Latin for “and the Son” thus giving the name of the controversy. The Eastern Church saw this addition as dangerous tampering with the Creed and refused to accept it while the Filioque clause became a standard part of what was considered normative doctrine in the West.Another major discussion arose over the question of predestina­tion. A Carolingian monk named Gottschalk, who studied Augustine's theology carefully, was the first to teach 'double predestination'; the belief that some people are predestined to salvation, while others are predestined to damnation. He was tried and condemned for his views by 2 synods and finally imprisoned by the Archbishop of Rheims. Gottschalk died 20 years later, holding his views to the end.The other major theological issue of the Carolingian era concerned the Lord's Supper. The influential Abbot of Corbie wrote a treatise titled On the Body and Blood of the Lord. This was the first clear statement of a doctrine of the 'real presence' of Christ's body and blood in the Communion elements, later called the doctrine of “transubstantiation,” an issue that will become a heated point in the debate between the Roman Church & Reformers.The reforms of King Pepin and Pope Boniface focused attention on priests. It was clear to all that clergy ought to lead lives beyond reproach. That synod after synod during the 6th, 7th, & 8th Cs had to make such a major issue of this demonstrated the need for reform. Among the violations warned against were the rejection of celibacy, gluttony, drunkenness, tawdry relationships with women, hunting, carry­ing arms & frequenting taverns.Monastic developments at this time were significant. The emphasis was on standardiza­tion and centralization. Between 813 and 17 a revised Benedictine rule was adopted for the whole of the Carolingian Empire. Another Benedict, a monk from Burgundy, was respon­sible for an ultra-strict regimen. Charlemagne's successor, Louis the Pious, appointed Benedict the overseer of all monasteries in the realm, and a few years later his revised Benedictine rule was made obligatory for all monasteries. Sadly, with little long-term effect.When Louis suc­ceeded Charlemagne, the Pope was able to regain his independ­ence, following a long domination by the Emperor. The imperial theocracy of Charlemagne's reign would have yielded a 'state church' as already existed in the East. But the papacy stressed the superiority of spiritual power over the secular. This was reinforced by the forged Donation of Constantine with its emphasis on papal pre-eminence in the governing of the Empire, not just the Church.In the middle of the 9th C, priests at Rheims produced another remarkable forgery, the False Decretals. Accomplished with great inventiveness, the Decretals were designed to provide a basis in law which protected the rights of bishops. They included the bogus Donation of Constantine and became a central part of the canon of medieval law. It shored up papal claims to supremacy in church affairs over secular authority. The first Pope to make use of the False Decretals was Nicholas I. He recognized the danger of a Church dominated by civil rulers and was deter­mined to avert this by stressing that the church's govern­ment was centered on Rome, not Constantinople, and certainly not in some lesser city like Milan or Ravenna.From the late 9th until the mid-11th C, Western Christendom was beset by a host of major challenges that left the region vulnerable. The Carolingian Empire frag­mented, leaving no major military power to defend Western Europe. Con­tinued attacks by Muslims in the S, a fresh wave of attacks by the Magyars in the E, and incessant raids by the Norsemen all over the Empire, turned the shards of the empire into splinters. One contemporary lamented, “Once we had a king, now we have kinglets!” For many Western Europeans, it seemed the end of the world was at hand.The popes no longer had Carolingian rulers as protectors. So the papacy became increasingly involved in the power struggles among the nobility for the rule of Italy. Popes became partisans of one political faction or another; sometimes willingly, other times coerced. But the cumulative result was spiritual and moral decline. For instance, Pope Stephen VI took vengeance on the preceding pope by having his body disinterred and brought before a synod, where it was propped up in a chair for trial. Following conviction, the body was thrown into the Tiber River. Then, within a year Stephen himself was overthrown. He was strangled while in prison.There was a near-complete col­lapse of civil order in Europe during the 10th C. Church property was ransacked by invaders or fell into the hands of the nobility. Noble­men treated churches and monas­teries as their private property to dispose of as they wished. The clergy became indifferent to duty. Their illiteracy & immorality grew.The 10th C was a genuine dark age, at least as far as the condition of the Church was concerned. Without imperial protection, popes became helpless playthings for the nobility, who fought to gain control by appointing relatives and political favorites. A chroni­cle by the German bishop of Cremona paints a graphic picture of sexual debauchery in the Church.Though there were incompet­ent & immoral popes during this time, they continued to be respected throughout the West. Bishoprics and abbeys were founded by laymen after they obtained the appro­val of the papal court. Pilgrimages to Rome hardly slackened during this age, as Christians visited the sacred sites of the West; that is, the tombs of Peter and Paul, as well as a host of other relics venerated in there.At the lowest ebb of the 10th C, during the reign of Pope John XII, from 955-64, a major change in Italian politics affected the papacy. An independent & capable German monarchy emerged. This Saxon dynasty began with the election of Henry I and continued with his son, Otto I, AKA Otto the Great . Otto developed a close relationship with the Church in Germany. Bishops and abbots were given the rights and honor of high nobility.  The church received huge tracts of land. Thru this alliance with the Church, Otto aimed to forestall the rebellious nobles of his kingdom.But the new spiritual aristocracy created by Otto wasn’t hereditary. Bishops & abbots couldn’t “pass on” their privileges to their successors. Favor was granted by the King to whomever he chose. Thus, their loyalty could be counted on more readily. In fact, the German bishops contributed money and arms to help the German kings expand into Italy, what is now the regions of East Germany & Poland.Otto helped raise the papacy out of the quagmire of Italian politics. His entrance into Italian affairs was a fateful deci­sion. He marched south into Italy to marry Adelaide of Burgundy and declare him­self king of the Lombards. Ten years later, he again marched south at the invitation of Pope John XII. In February of 962, the Pope tried a renewal of the Holy Roman Empire by crowning Otto and Adelaide in St Peter's. But the price paid by the pope for Otto’s support was another round of interference in Church affairs.For the next 300 years, each new German monarch followed up his election by making a march to Rome to be crowned as Emperor. But at this point, it wasn’t so much Popes who made Emperors as it was Emperors who made Popes. And when a pope ran afoul of the ruler, he was conveniently labeled ‘anti-pope’ & deposed, to be replaced by the next guy. It was the age of musical chairs in Rome; whoever grabs the papal chair when the music stops gets to sit. But when the Emperor instructs the band to play again, whoever’s in the chair has to stand and the game starts all over again. Lest you think I’m overstating the case, in 963 Otto returned to Rome, convened a synod which found Pope John guilty of a list of sordid crimes and deposed him. In his place, they chose a layman, who received all of his ecclesiastical orders in a single day to become Pope Leo VIII. He managed to sit in the Pope’s chair less than a year before the music started all over again.

Welcome to the 49th installment of CS. This episode is titled “Charlemagne Pt. 2.”After his coronation on Christmas Day AD 800, Charlemagne said he didn’t know it had been planned by Pope Leo III. If setting the crown of a new Holy Roman Empire on his head was a surprise, he got over the shock right quick. He quickly shot off dispatches to the lands under his control to inform them he was large and in-charge. Each missive began with these words,  “Charles, by the will of God, Roman Emperor, Augustus … in the year of our consulship 1.” He required an oath be taken to him as Caesar by all officers, whether religious or civil. He sent ambassadors to soothe the inevitable wrath of the Emperor in Constantinople.What’s important to note is how his coronation ceremony in St. Peter’s demonstrated the still keen memory of the Roman Empire that survived in Europe. His quick emergence as the recognized leader of a large part of Europe revealed the strong desire there was to reestablish a political unity that had been absent from the region for 400 years. But, Charlemagne’s coronation launched a long-standing contest. One we’d not expect, since it was, after all, the Pope who crowned him. The contest was between the revived empire and the Roman Church.In the medieval world, Church and State were two realms comprising Christendom. The Medieval Church represented Christian society aimed at acquiring spiritual blessings, while the Medieval State existed to safeguard civil justice and tranquility. Under the medieval system, both Church and State were supposed to exist side by side in a harmonious relationship, each focused on gaining the good of mankind but in different spheres; the spiritual and the civil.In reality, it rarely worked that way. The Pope and Emperor were usually contestants in a game of thrones. The abiding question was: Does the Church rule the State, or the State the Church? This contest was played out on countless fields, large and small, throughout the Middle Ages.Charlemagne left no doubt about where sovereignty lay during His reign. He provided Europe a colossal father figure as the first Holy Roman Emperor. Everyone was answerable to him. To solve the problem of supervising local officials in his expansive realm, Charlemagne passed an ordinance creating the missi dominici or king’s envoys. These were pairs of officials, a bishop and noble, who traveled the realm to check on local officials. Even the pope was kept under the watchful imperial eye.Though Charlemagne occasionally used the title “emperor” in official documents, he usually declined it because it appeared to register his acceptance of what the Pope had done at his coronation. Charlemagne found this dangerous; that the Pope was now in a position to make an Emperor. The concern was—The one who can MAKE an emperor, can un-make him. Charles thought it ought to be the other way around; that Emperors selected and sanctioned Popes.In truth, what Pope Leo III did on Christmas Day of 800 when he placed the crown on Charlemagne’s head was just a final flourish of what was already a well-established fact – Charles was King of the Franks. One recent lecturer described the coronation as the cherry on the top of a sundae that had already been made by Charles the Great.In our last episode we saw a major objective of Charlemagne’s vision was to make Europe an intellectual center. He launched a revival of learning and the arts. Historians speak of this as the Carolingian Renaissance. Charlemagne required monasteries to have a school for the education of boys in grammar, math and singing. At his capital of Aachen he built a school for the education of the royal court. The famous English scholar Alcuin headed the school, and began the difficult task of reviving learning in the early Middle Ages by authoring the first textbooks in grammar, rhetoric, and logic.It was Charlemagne’s emphasis on education that proved to be his enduring legacy to history. He sent out agents far and wide to secure every work of the classical age they could find. They returned to Aachen and the monastery schools where they were translated into Latin. This is why Latin became the language of scholarship in the ages to come. It was helped along by Charlemagne’s insistence a standard script be developed – Carolingian miniscule. Now, scholars all across Western Europe could read the same materials, because a consistent script was being used for Latin letters.This became one of the most important elements in making the Renaissance possible.Few historians deny Charlemagne’s massive impact on European history, and thereby, the history of the modern world. The center of western civilization shifted from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe. After 300 years of virtual chaos, Charles the Great restored a measure of law and order. His sponsorship of the intellectual arts laid a heritage of culture for future generations. And the imperial ideal he revived persisted as a political force in Europe until 1806, when the Holy Roman Empire was terminated by another self-styled emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.In reality, the peace of Charlemagne’s rule was short-lived. His empire were too vast, its nobility too powerful to be held together once his domineering personality was removed. Like Clovis before him, Charlemagne’s successors were weak and the empire disintegrated into a confusion of civil wars and new invasions. The Northmen began their incessant raiding forays, called going “a-viking” à So we know them as the Vikings. They set sail from Scandinavia in their shallow-hulled long ships, able to sail up rivers and deep inland, where they raided villages, towns and any other unfortunate hamlet they came on. These raids of the Vikings, forced the native peoples to surrender, first their lands, then their persons to the counts, dukes, and other local lords who began to multiply during this time, in return for protection from the raiders. It’s not difficult to see how the process of feudalism developed.Common people needed protection from raiders; whoever they were. But the king and his army was a long way away. It could take weeks, months even, to send a message and get help in reply. In the meantime, the Vikings are right here; right now. See ‘em? Yeah à That blond, long-haired giant berserker with his 2 headed battle axe is about to crash through my door. What good is the king and his army in Aachen or Paris?What I need is someone near with enough men at his call, enough trained and armed soldiers that is, who can turn away a long-ship’s crew of 50 berserkers. How expensive is it to hire, train, outfit and keep a group of soldiers; figure 2 for ever Viking? Who can field an army of a hundred professional soldiers? Well, the nearest Count is 20 minutes away and he only has a half dozen hired men for protection.That count’s a smart guy though and realizes he’s the only one in the area to do what needs to be done. So he goes to 25 of the area’s farmers and says, “Listen, I’ll protect you. But to do that, I need to field an army of a hundred men. That’s very expensive to do so here’s what I need in exchange for protection: Give me the title to your land.  You live on and continue to work it. You keep half the yield of all the farm produces; the rest is mine. And for that, I and my army will keep you safe.”When the choice is either yield to that Count or face the long-ships on your own; there’s not much choice. So feudalism with its system of serfs, counts, barons, dukes, and earls began.Central to feudalism was the personal bond between lord and vassals. In the ceremony known as the act of homage, the vassal knelt before his lord, and promised to be his “man.” In the oath of loyalty that followed, called fealty, the vassal swore on a Bible, or a sacred object such as a Cross. Then, in the ritual of investiture, a spear, a glove, or a bit of straw was handed to the vassal to signify his control, but not ownership, over his allotted piece of the lord’s realm.The feudal contract between lord and vassal was sacred and binding on both parties. Breaking the tie was a major felony because it was the basic bond of medieval society. It was thought that to break the rules of feudal society was to imperil all of society, civilization itself.The lord was obliged to give his vassals protection and justice. Vassals not only worked the land for the Lord, they also gave 40 days w/o pay each year to serve as militia in the event of all-out war. But only 40 days, because as farmers, they needed to be home to work their fields and tend the herds.For the most part, this system worked pretty well, as long as the lord treated his vassals well. What became a problem was when lords got greedy and decided to mobilize their army and militia to make a land grab on a neighboring lord. Ideally, Feudalism was supposed to be for protection, not conquest.As the Church was so much a part of medieval life, it couldn’t escape being included in the feudal system. Since the Vikings were equal opportunity raiders, they had no qualms whatever about breaking into churches, convents and monasteries, putting priests and monks to the sword, raping nuns, and absconding with church treasures. This meant the Church turned to local lords for protection as well. Bishops and abbots also became vassals, receiving from the lord a specific region over which their authority lay. In return, they had to provide some service to the Lord. Monasteries produced different goods which they paid as tribute, and priests were often made the special private clergy for the noble’s family. This became a problem when loyalty to the lord conflicted with a ruling from or mission assigned by the Church.  Who were the abbots, priest and bishops to obey, the duke 10 minutes from here, or the Pope weeks away in Rome? In the 10th and early 11th Cs the popes were in no position to challenge anyone. The office fell into decay after becoming a prize sought by the Roman nobility.What made the latter Middle Ages so complex was the massive intrigue that took place between Nobles and Church officials who learned how to play the feudal game. Society was governed by strict rules. But there were always ways to get around them.  And when one couldn’t get around them, if you had enough money or a big enough army, why bother with rules when you can write your own, or pay the rule-interpreters to interpret them in your favor. We know how complex political maneuvering can be today. Compared to Europe of the High Middle Ages, we’re infants in a nursery. Don’t forget, it was that era and system that produced Machiavelli.On a positive note; while there were a few corrupt Church officials who saw religious office as just another way to gain political power, most bishops, priests and abbots sought to influence for the better the behavior of the feudal nobles so their vassals would be taken care of in an ethical manner. In time, their work added the Christian virtues to a code of knightly conduct that came to be called Chivalry. Now, to be clear, chivalry ended up being more an ideal than a practice. A few knights and members of the nobility embraced the Chivalric ideals but others just took advantage of those who sought to live by them.Knights in shining armor, riding off on dangerous quests to rescue fair maidens makes for fun stories, but it’s not the way Chivalry played out in history. It was an ideal the Church worked hard to instill in the increasingly brutal Feudal Age. Bishops tried to impose limitations on warfare. In the 11th C they inaugurated a couple initiatives called the Peace of God and the Truce of God. The Peace of God banned anyone who pillaged sacred places or refused to spare noncombatants from being able to participate at Communion or receiving any of the other sacraments. The Truce of God set up periods of time when no fighting was allowed. For instance, no combat could be conducted from sunset Wednesday to sunrise Monday and during other special seasons, such as Lent. Good ideas, but both rules were conveniently set aside when they worked contrary to some knights desires.During the 11th C, the controversy between Church and State centered on the problem of what’s called Investiture. And this goes back now to something that had been in tension for centuries, and was renewed in the crowning of Charlemagne.It was supposed to be that bishops and abbots were appointed to their office by the Church. Their spiritual authority was invested in them by a Church official. But because bishops and abbots had taken on certain feudal responsibilities, they were invested with civil authority by the local noble; sometimes by the king himself.  Problems arose when a king refused to invest a bishop because said bishop was more interested in the Church’s cause than the king’s. He wanted someone more compliant to his agenda, while the Church wanted leaders who would look out for her interests. It was a constant game of brinkmanship, in which whatever institution held most influence, had the say in who lead the churches and monasteries. In places like Germany where the king was strong, bishops and abbots were his men. Where the Church had greater influence, it was the bishops and abbots who dominated political affairs.But that was the controversy of the 11th C. The Church of the 10th could see the way things were headed in its affiliation with the Throne and knew it was not prepared to challenge kings and emperors. It needed to set its own house in order because things had slipped badly for a couple hundred years. Moral corruption had infected large portions of the clergy and learning had sunk to a low. Many of the clergy were illiterate and marked by grave superstitions. It was time for renewal and reform. This was led by the Benedictine order of Cluny, founded in 910. From their original monastery in Eastern France, the Benedictines exerted a powerful impulse of reform within the feudal Church. The Cluniac program began as monastic reform movement, but spread to the European Church as a whole. It enforced the celibacy of priests and abolished the purchase of church offices; a corrupt practice called Simony.The goal of the Clunaic reformers was to free the Church from secular control and return it to the Pope’s authority.  Nearly 300 monasteries were freed from control by the nobles, and in 1059 the papacy itself was delivered from secular interference. This came about by the creation of the College of Cardinals, which from then on selected the Pope.The man who led the much-needed reform of the papacy was an arch-deacon named Hildebrand. He was elected pope in 1073 and given the title Gregory VII. He claimed more power for the papal office than had been known before and worked for the creation of a Christian Empire under the Pope’s control. Rather than equality between Church and State, Gregory said spiritual power was supreme and therefore trumped the temporal power of nobles and kings. In 1075 he banned investiture by civil officials and threatened to excommunicate anyone who performed it as well as any clergy who submitted to it. This was a virtual declaration of war on Europe’s rulers since most of them practiced lay investiture.The climax to the struggle between Pope Gregory and Europe’s nobility took place in his clash with the emperor Henry IV. The pope accused Henry of Simony in appointing his own choice to be the archbishop of Milan. Gregory summoned Henry to Rome to explain his conduct. Henry refused to go but convened a synod of German bishops in 1076 that declared Gregory a usurper and unfit to be Pope.  The synod declared, “Wherefore henceforth we renounce, now and for the future, all obedience to you.” In retaliation, Gregory excommunicated Henry and deposed him, absolving his subjects from their oaths of allegiance.Now, remember how sacred and firm those feudal oaths between lord and vassal were! The Pope, who was supposed to be God’s representative on Earth, sent a message to all Henry’s subjects saying not only was Henry booted out of the Church, and so destined to the eternal flames of hell, he was no longer king or emperor; their bonds to him were dissolved. Furthermore, to continue to give allegiance to Henry was to defy the Pope who opens and closes the door to heaven. Uhh, do you really want to do that? Can you see where this is going? Henry may have an army, but that army has to eat and if the peasants and serfs won’t work, the army falls apart.Henry was convinced by the German nobles who revolted against him to make peace with Pope Gregory. He appeared before the Pope in January of 1077. Dressed as a penitent, the emperor stood barefoot in the snow for 3 days and begged forgiveness until, in Gregory’s words “We loosed the chain of the anathema and at length received him … into the lap of the Holy Mother Church.”This dramatic humiliation of an emperor did not forever end the contest between the throne and the pope. But the Church made progress toward freeing itself from interference by nobles. The problem of investiture was settled in 1122 by a compromise known as the Concordat of Worms. The Church kept the right to appoint the holder of a church office, then the nobles endorsed him.The Popes who followed Gregory added little to the authority of the papacy. They also insisted society was organized under the pope as its visible head, and he was guarded against all possibility of error by the Apostle Peter perpetually-present in his successors.During the Middle Ages, for the first time, Europe became conscious of itself as a unity. It was the Church that facilitated that identity. Though it struggled with the challenge of how to wield power without being corrupted by it, the Church gained a level of influence over the lives of men and women that for the most part it used to benefit society.We’re used to seeing priests and bishops of the medieval era as modern literature and movies cast them. It’s far more interesting to make them out to be villains and scoundrels, instead of godly servants of Christ who lived virtuous lives. A survey of movies and novels written about the Middle Ages shows that churchmen are nearly always cast in 1 of 2 ways; the best are naïve but illiterate bumblers, while the worst are conniving criminals who hide their wickedness behind a cross. While there was certainly a handful of each of these 2 type-casts; the vast majority of priests and monks were simply godly lovers of Jesus who worked tirelessly to bring His love and truth to the people of their day. Guys like that just don’t make for very interesting characters in a murder mystery set in a medieval monastery.