The universities aided in the recovery and dissemination of Aristotelianism, particularly in the physical sciences and metaphysics. Only the new universities, moreover, could have housed and spread the intellectual work of Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–1274) and Bonaventure (1217–74), the greatest theologians of the 13th century, and of Henry of Segusio (Hostiensis; c. 1200–71) and Sinibaldo Fieschi (later Pope Innocent IV, reigned 1243–54), the greatest canon lawyers of the century.
St. Thomas Aquinas Enthroned Between the Doctors of the Old and New Testaments, with Personifications of the Virtues, Sciences, and Liberal Arts, fresco by Andrea da Firenze, c. 1365; in the Spanish Chapel of the church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence.SCALA/Art Resource, New York
The structure of ecclesiastical and devotional life
Ecclesiastical organization
With the removal of the most offensive instances of lay influence in ecclesiastical affairs, the organization of the universal church and local churches acquired a symmetry and consistency hardly possible before 1100. An 11th-century anonymous text that was accepted by canon law identified two orders of Christians, the clergy and the laity. It considered the clergy largely in a monastic context, indicating that the new attention to the secular clergy had transferred to them the virtues and discipline of monks. Although many monks were not ordained priests, their disciplined, contemplative life was held up for centuries as the ideal clerical model.
The work of the laity was the business of the world. The clergy, however, considered itself far more important than the laity. Members of the clergy themselves were ranked in terms of sacramental orders, minor and major. When a boy or young man entered the clergy, he received the tonsure, symbolizing his new status. He might then move in stages through the minor orders: acolyte, exorcist, lector, and doorkeeper. At the highest of minor orders the candidate could still leave the clergy. Many clerics in minor orders served in the administration of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. They also sometimes caused trouble in secular society, since even they received benefit of clergy, or exemption from trial in secular courts. Ordination to the major orders—subdeacon (elevated to a major order by Pope Innocent III in 1215), deacon, and priest—entailed vows of chastity and conferred sacramental powers on the recipient.
At the head of the Latin Christian church was the pope, whose powers were now articulated in canon law, most of which was made by the popes themselves and by their legal advisers. Not only did popes claim powers over even secular rulers in many instances, but a number of rulers, including King John of England (reigned 1199–1216), submitted their kingdoms to the popes and received them back to govern for their new spiritual and temporal masters. The popes also issued charters of foundation for universities, convened church councils, called Crusades and commissioned preachers to deliver Crusade sermons, and appointed papal judges delegate or subdelegate to investigate specific problems. In all these areas, as in the articulation of canon law, papal authority directly affected the lives of all Christians, as well as the lives of Jews and Muslims in their relations with Christians.
The popes were assisted by the College of Cardinals, which was transformed during the papal-imperial conflict from a group of Roman liturgical assistants into a body of advisers individually appointed by the popes. Among its duties articulated in conciliar and papal decrees of 1059 and 1179—rules still in effect in the Roman Catholic Church today—was to elect the pope. A cardinal could be a cardinal bishop (if the church he was given was outside the city of Rome, whose only bishop, of course, was the pope himself), a cardinal priest, or a cardinal deacon. Cardinals also had different roles. The cardinal bishop of Ostia, for example, always crowned a new pope. For some time the senior cardinal deacon gave the pope his papal name, a practice that began in the 10th century, perhaps in imitation of monastic tradition.
The papacy developed other means to implement its authority. After the Concordat of Worms (1122), which settled some aspects of the Investiture Controversy, popes held regular assemblies of higher clergy in church councils, the first of which was the first Lateran Council in 1123. Conciliar legislation was the means by which reform principles were most efficiently formulated and disseminated to the highest clerical levels. Although councils in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries were closely controlled by the popes, later councils sometimes opposed papal authority with claims to conciliar authority, a position generally known as conciliarism. Papal legates, judges, and emissaries, widely used by Gregory VII and later popes, were dispatched with full papal authority to deal with issues in distant parts of Europe.
Papal collectors, who received funds owed to the popes for Crusading or other purposes, were also essential components of papal government. The papal chamberlain of Celestine III (1191–98), Cencio Savelli (later Pope Honorius III; 1216–27), produced the Liber Censuum (“The Book of the Census”) in 1192, the first comprehensive account of the sources of papal funding. In this respect, as in the formal communications of the papal chancery, the pope created an influential model, imitated by all other European principalities and kingdoms. Although only four papal registers (collections of important papal letters and decisions) from before 1198 survive more or less intact, all registers since then have been preserved.
The day-to-day work of the popes was carried out by the Roman Curia; the name Curia Romana was first used by Urban II at the end of the 11th century. The Curia consisted of the chancery; the Apostolic Camera, or financial centre; the consistory, or legal office, including the Roman Rota (chief papal court); and the Penitentiary, or spiritual and confessional office. The popes were also the secular rulers of Rome and the Papal States, and accordingly their servants included the rulers and officials of these territories.
The popes ran afoul of local movements for greater independence, including the revolution led by Arnold of Brescia, the priest and religious dissident, in 1143. Revolts continued throughout the 13th century and increased in frequency during the Avignon papacy (1305–78), when the popes resided in Avignon, and during the Great Schism (1378–1417), when there were two and then three claimants for the papal office. (The crisis was resolved in 1415–18 at the Council of Constance, which elected a new pope and restored papal authority over the city of Rome and the Papal States.) When a pope could safely reside in Rome, he worked at the church of St. John Lateran, his cathedral as bishop of the city of Rome, and not at the Vatican, which was chiefly a pilgrimage shrine. Only after Martin V (1417–31), the pope elected at the Council of Constance, found that the papal quarters at the Lateran had fallen into ruins was the papal residence and administration moved to the Vatican.
Lower levels of the clerical hierarchy replicated the papal administration on a smaller scale. The immense dioceses of northern Europe, ruled by prince-archbishops (as in Cologne) or by prince-bishops (as in Durham), were very different from the tiny rural dioceses of southern Italy. Within the secular clergy the highest rank below the pope was that of primate, who was usually the regional head of a group of archbishops. The archbishops, or metropolitans, ruled archdioceses, or provinces, holding provincial synods of clergy under their jurisdiction, ruling administrative courts, and supervising the suffragan bishops (bishops assigned to assist in the administration of the archdiocese). The archbishop was expected to make regular visits to the ecclesiastical institutions in his province and to hear appeals from the verdicts of courts at lower levels.