Steve Juanico

Dr. Martin Pine

ACE Social Science Seminar 015

19 December 1997

                                        Explain fully the role of the king in relation to the Church and 

the nobility in each of the following periods:

                                  a.)The Early Middle Ages

                                  b.)The High Middle Ages

                                  c.)The Renaissance

    The king during the Early Middle Ages was in law (de jure) supreme.  The

kingdoms at this period were the immediate successors of the Carolingian Empire

after its collapse.   Most medieval kings wereraised to office by a combination

of ritual acts.  The king would first be chosen in an assembly from among the last

kin of the last ruler, whose nomination would carry great weight in cases of

doubt.  This choice was not often complete until the new king traveled through

his kingdom in a continuous election.  The king then would be consecrated in a

liturgy copied from the Old Testament precedents of Saul and Solomon and

would be invested with such insignia as crown, sword, helmet, or scepter.  Before

or after this ceremony, the nobles of the kingdom declared their allegiance and

often performed symbolic acts of domestic service at the coronation feast.   As

the anointed of the Lord, the king had a special claim on the obedience of the

Church and a measure of physical security.  The violent death of a king was 

regarded as a strike against the fabric of the divine and moral order.

    The king during the Early Middle Ages, however, was in fact (de facto) weak.

He was dependent on the nobles and the Church for military aid, taxes, etc.   He

controlled only the royal domain, which was relatively small compared to the lands

owned by the nobles and the Church.  The king of France, for example, controlled

only Paris and its environs while the duke of Normandy governed an immense fief

in western France and England as well.  Moreover, the French king had no

influence in the in the petty counties in the northeastern frontier and the

autonomous bishoprics in the south.  He could not raise an army to enforce his

will because of a lack of financial resources.  The nobles, on the other hand, did

not take their duties toward the king very seriously, and they rendered their

services only when it pleased them.  They defied the king's authority by

exercising their own judicial, financial, and administrative functions in their

lands.  The nobility, at this period, were the trained military elite, and they built

castles at strategic locations around their territories to further tighten their

grip on their lands.  The Church, during this period, was also stronger than the

king.  She was a great economic power because she owned vast tracts of lands.

Most of these lands were donated originally by Roman emperors or

bequeathed by wealthy but dying Christians.  The Church had great spiritual and

moral authority because the people fervently believed that she was their link to

God.  An alliance between Church and king existed.  It was the continuation of

the Franco-papal agreement made during the reign of the Carolingian monarch,

Pepin.  The Church back then was weak and needed protection against rapacious

nobles and marauding barbarians.  This alliance, however, proved dangerous for

the Church because she gave the power of lay investiture to the king.  The

monarch was given the authority to appoint his nominees to the bishoprics.  The

king had an understandable interest in their appointment since the bishops

governed vast Church lands, which meant that they held secular and ecclesiastical

power simultaneously.  But the king often appointed men who were morally

deficient and worldly, which resulted in the corruption of the

clergy.  The Church increasingly became secularized.  Clerical marriage and

concubinage were common practices.  She condoned this alliance because she was

not yet strong enough to challenge the lay domination of the Church.

    The spirit of commercial enterprise began to spread during the High Middle

Ages.  The period saw the widespread rise of commercial exchange,

manufacturing, and urban areas.  Towns and cities began to increase in size and

number.  Trade became integrated permanently to the local economy.  Industries,

especially those engaged in textile production, expanded.  It was an age of

economic renewal.  These economic developments were beneficial to the king

because the interests of the towns and cities coincided with his efforts to unify

his kingdom and to centralize his power.  The towns and cities provided the king,

through taxes, with financial support.  The king, in return, gave them a uniform

system of law, currency, taxation, and defense.  Uniformity was the key element.

Uniformity meant, for the towns and cities, political, fiscal, and economic

stability.  Stability meant more profits for them because it is the condition

needed for trade to thrive.  So, the king now had the financial ability to

raise a strong army to defeat the nobles and enforce his will.

    At the very moment, however, when the king was beginning to consolidate his

power, the Church also became strong.  A great reform movement, spearheaded

by the Cluniac monks, swept the Church.  The Cluniac monks, at every

opportunity, attacked the evils of lay investiture.  Celibacy of the clergy was

strenuously advocated.  The reform movement proclaimed the freedom of the

Church from lay authority and her ascendancy over worldly powers.  Pope

Gregory VII concluded that lay domination of the Church was producing

unworthy clerics, undermining clerical morality, and jeopardizing the salvation of

Christians.  He demanded not only freedom from lay interference in clerical

appointments but also immunity of the clergy from royal law and taxes.  Henry

IV, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, resisted the pope's demands.  The pope

retaliated by excommunicating him and interdicting his kingdom.  The emperor,

wearing a sackcloth, was forced to do a humiliating penance before the

pope in Canossa.  This power struggle became known as the Investiture

Controversy.  Henry IV's penance at Canossa symbolized the growing temporal

power of the Church.  The Concordant of Worms patched together a compromise

with respect to clerical appointments.  Bishops were chosen by the clergy but

with the king's approval.  Furthermore, the Church could now raise its own

forces to confront the armies of the king and nobles.

    From the narrow issue of lay investiture, the conflict between Church and king

developed into an issue of supremacy.  Henry II, king of England, wanted to

decrease the power of the Church in his kingdom by eliminating the ecclesiastical

courts.  The king wanted the royal courts to have jurisdiction over clerics who

had committed crimes.  He argued that all criminal prelates in England should be

tried in royal courts because they were Englishmen.  His first move was to

appoint his close friend, Thomas Á Becket, as archbishop of Canterbury.  The

king assumed that Becket, who earlier served him loyally and efficiently as

chancellor, would support his plan.  Once he was appointed archbishop, however,

Becket became a militant defender of the Church against royal encroachment and

a champion of the idea of Church supremacy over the secular world.  Becket's

defiance enraged the king; he incited four of his knights to murder the king in

Canterbury Cathedral.  The murder of the archbishop caused an uproar.  Almost

overnight he became a martyred saint in the eyes of the people.  The

king denied responsibility for the murder and was forced to reconcile with the

Church.  The success of the Church in her struggle for supremacy showed that

she was now a temporal power to be reckoned with.  The relationship of the king

with regards to the nobility and the Church during the High Middle Ages,

therefore, was one of equality.

    The Renaissance was the period where the king surpassed the Church and the

nobility in power, prestige, and authority.  The financial resources of the king

increased dramatically because of the economic boom experienced by the towns

and cities.  The financial resources of the Church and the nobility could no

longer match the rapid growth of the king's wealth.  The economic system was

changing from an agrarian economy to a commercial one.  In Italy, where the

banking system was first developed, new monetary techniques were employed to

free the king from dependence on taxation for revenues.  Credit, in the form of

long term loans and bonds, was extended to the king to finance his war

campaigns.  This development gave him great leverage because he could now

borrow on future income to raise and maintain a large army.  Furthermore,

technological innovations in the use of gunpowder proved decisive in the royal

struggle for supremacy.  Cannons and firearms were invented.  Because of his

increased wealth and new credit, the king was the only one who could

afford to have guns and artillery.  The castles of the nobles, which were so

important during the Early Middle Ages, became obsolete since its walls offered

no protection against sustained cannon fire.  The monopoly of the nobles in

military training and expertise was negated by the use of firearms.  The handling

of firearms required little training, and firearms were cheap and easy to

manufacture when compared with the long bow and the crossbow.  Guns could

penetrate the thickest armor that the nobility wore.  The infantry replaced the

cavalry as the decisive element in the battlefield.  This trend is known as the

proletariatization and royalization of warfare.  War became a royal

prerogative.  For the king, the Renaissance was a time of royal

housekeeping—the expansion and unification of the royal domain.  Diplomatic

innovations also helped the king.  The Italian city-states were the first to create

permanent diplomatic missions in neighboring cities.  Regular and accurate

reports on local conditions helped the king make a sound and realistic plan of

action.

    The Church at this time was badly weakened by her involvement in temporal

struggles.  She won the battles but lost the war.  The violent attack on Pope

Boniface VII by the French king, Philip IV, marked the first open rejection of

Church supremacy by the rising monarchies of the West.  The issue this time was

the legality of clerical taxation by the king without papal approval.  The pope

issued a bull prohibiting lay taxation without papal consent.  Philip, affronted by

this threat to his authority and treasury, responded with military force, which

forced Boniface to retreat and proclaim the legitimacy of clerical taxation

without the papal permission when the monarch attested to its necessity.  The

impotence of the Church was further demonstrated when the papacy was forced

to abandon Rome in favor of Avignon.  The Avignon papacy, which lasted about a

hundred years, destroyed the prestige of the Church.  A papal schism ensued

when one pope was elected in Rome and another one in Avignon with both claiming

legitimacy.  Popes and antipopes excommunicated each other, which weakened the

Church considerably because it spread great uncertainty among the faithful

about the validity of the consecration of bishops and the sacraments as

administered by the priests they ordained.  Consequently, the schism fueled the

desire for a parliamentary form of church government and promoted the rise of

the conciliar movement, which advocated the supreme authority

of ecumenical councils of the Church.

   In conclusion, the power, prestige, and authority of the king was weak

compared to that of the nobility and the Church during the Early Middle Ages.

In the High Middle Ages, the king had the advantage over the nobility, but his

relationship with the Church can be characterized as one of equality.  And

finally, the royal power became supreme during the Renaissance, which surpassed

both the power of the nobles and the Church.