Medieval Society: Church, Piety, and Control

The church had long sought to reform the secular world. In the eleventh century, during the Gregorian reform, such efforts focused on the king. In the thirteenth century, however, the church hoped to purify all of society. It tried to strengthen its situations of law and justice to combat heretics, and it supported preachers who would bring the official views of the church to the streets.

In this way, the church attempted to reorder the world in the image of heaven, with everyone following one rule of God in harmony. To some degree, the church succeeded in this endeavor, but it also came up against the limits of control, as dissident voices and forces clashed with its vision.

Innocent III was the most powerful, respected, and prestigious of medieval popes. As pope, he allowed St. Francis's group of impoverished followers to become a new church order, and he called the Fourth Crusade, which mobilized a large force drawn from every level of European society.

From theology, he learned to tease new meaning out of canonical writings to magnify papal authority: he thought of himself as ruling in the place of Christ the King, with kings and emperors existing to help the pope. From law, Innocent gained his conception of the pope as lawmaker and of law as an instrument of moral reformation. Innocent used the traditional method of declaring church law a council.

The word inquisition simply means "investigation." Secular rulers had long used the method to summon people together, either to discover facts or to uncover and punish crimes.

Most of the time, the inquisitors first called the people of a district to a "preaching," where they gave a sermon and promised clemency to those who promptly confessed their heresy.

The church's zeal to reform the laity was matched by the desire of many laypeople to become more involved in their religion. They flocked to hear the preaching of friars and took what they heard to heart. Some women found new outlets for their piety by focusing on the Eucharist.

Scholasticism was the culmination of the method of logical inquiry and exposition pioneered by masters like Peter Abelard and Peter the Chanter. In the thirteenth century, the method was used to summarize and reconcile all knowledge. Many of the thirteenth-century scholastics were members of the Dominican and Franciscan orders and taught in the universities. On the whole, they were confident that knowledge obtained through the senses and reason was compatible with the knowledge derived from faith and revelation.

One of the scholastics' goals was to demonstrate this harmony. The scholastic summary of knowledge was a systematic exposition of the answer to every possible question about human morality, the physical world, society, belief, action, and theology. Another goal of the scholastics was to preach the conclusions of these treatises.

Gothic architecture, like philosophy, literature, and music, melded the sacred and the secular. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Gothic style had spread across most of Europe. Elements of Gothic style began to appear as well in other forms of art: stained glass, sculpture, painting.

The quest for order, control, and harmony also became part of the political agendas of princes, popes, and cities. These rulers and institutions imposed, or tried to impose, their authority ever more fully and systematically through taxes, courts, and sometimes representative institutions.

During the thirteenth century, new groups, generally made up of the non-noble classes, "the popolo," who fought on foot, attempted to take over the reins of power from the nobility in many Italian communes. The popolo incorporated members of city associations such as craft and merchant guilds, parishes, and the commune itself. In fact, the popolo was a kind of alternative commune.