Church Reform

The commercial revolution affected the church no less than it affected other institutions of the time. Typically, kings or powerful local lords appointed bishops, who then ruled over the city. This transaction involved gifts: churchmen gave gifts and money to secular leaders in return for their offices. Soon the same sorts of people who appreciated the fates of Dives and Lazarus were condemning such transactions. The impulse to free the church from “the world”—from rulers, wealth, sex, money, and power—was as old as the origins of monasticism; but, beginning in the tenth century and increasing to fever pitch in the eleventh, reformers demanded that the church as a whole remodel itself and become free of secular entanglements.

This freedom was, from the start, as much a matter of power as of religion. Most people had long believed that their ruler—whether king, duke, count, or castellan—reigned by the grace of God and had the right to control the churches in his territory. But by the second half of the eleventh century, more and more people saw a great deal wrong with secular power over the church. They looked to the papacy to lead the movement of church reform. The matter came to a head during the so-called Investiture Conflict, when Pope Gregory VII clashed with Emperor Henry IV (whose empire embraced both Germany and Italy). The Investiture Conflict ushered in a major civil war in Germany and a great upheaval in the distribution of power across western Europe. By the early 1100s, a reformed church—with the pope at its head—was penetrating into areas of life never before touched by churchmen. Church reform began as a way to free the church from the world, but in the end the church was thoroughly involved in the new world it had helped create.