Power Storm
The Investiture Controversy, Innocent III, and Philip IV "The Fair"
The power struggle in Medieval Europe had been a tug of war between the secular realm and the religious realm. Both the pope and the kings were trying to overpower one another to achieve supremacy. Sometimes it was possible for one side to completely dominate the other; at other times they were mingled and interdependent.
The Investiture Controversy was a major conflict that started in 1075 and lasted until the late 12th century between the church and the state over investiture, the power to install bishops. It was at the time when Pope Gregory VII was starting his Gregorian Reforms, which gave the church exclusive power over the state and made lay investiture invalid, that Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor who was no longer a child anymore, appointed his own bishops to the churches inside his empire. Henry IV further denounced Gregory VII and withdrew his imperial support, while Gregory VII sent Henry’s bishops back and excommunicating Henry IV. Due to the several rebellions that thus rose against Henry, Henry was forced to apologize to Gregory at Canossa. It never ended until several successors later. This conflict had not only blurred the possession of power between the pope and the emperor but also obscured the distinction between state and church, as many of the supporters of Henry IV were the bishops he appointed.
To the question of Who is greater, the pope or the emperor, Pope Innocent III would probably give a decisive answer: he was one of the most prestigious and powerful medieval popes. Within his 18 years of papacy since 1198, he had not only peaked the power and independence of the papacy through the continuation of the Gregorian Reform, but also unified the practice of theology, eliminated heretic and non-Christian groups, and, most importantly, claimed supremacy over all European kings. In the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, he established the sacraments and promulgated various decrees on what clergy should wear, how they hold act, and what sort of lives they should lead. He directed the lay officials to assemble crusades to retake Jerusalem and the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars. The Catholic Church under Innocent III flourished as an independent power.
King Philip IV of France, on the other hand, was a centralized, powerful king in the late 13th century. During his war against King Edward I of England, he taxed the clergy to fund his military. Going to war with another Christian country was not a crusade, so Pope Boniface VIII, who claimed church above state, forbade the lay taxation. Following Boniface excommunicating Philip, Philip sent soldiers to capture Boniface, who died later during his imprisonment. Philip further moved the papacy to Avignon in 1309 and selected his own pope, placing the papal power under his control for several decades. This was not all. Philip forced Pope Clement V to declare the Templars as heretics and executed most of them to confiscate their extensive wealth. The Catholic Church was at its trough under Philip; it had no real power.
Both the church and the states had their victorious moments: Pope Innocent III hegemonized the secular authorities and King Philip IV hijacked the papacy. However, most of the time the power struggle was intertwined, just as how there was no clear winner in the Investiture Controversy between Gregory VII and Henry IV.
Advanced Visions
Martin Luther, Hernan Cortes, and Galileo Galilei
Throughout the centuries of the Middle Ages, several key shifts altered the course of the historical stream. Almost as always, these turning points were escorted by pioneers who thrust the world into a new era: Martin Luther who led the Reformation in the early 16th century, Hernan Cortes who kicked off the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the early 16th century, and Galileo Galilei who set the Scientific Revolution in motion in the early 17th century.
Martin Luther devoted his life to religion by becoming an Augustinian Friar and later a professor of Biblical Theology at the University of Wittenberg. Concerned with the church’s practice of selling indulgences, namely the abuse of clerical power for financial gains, he published the Ninety-five Theses in 1517 but was suppressed by the church into obedience. Luther was left with no choice but to publish his Three Treatises of 1520 to make his voice clear. In the treatises, he urged the German nobility to reform the church, argued for three sacraments instead of seven, and instigated the idea that humans are saved through faith alone. This implied that priests are not necessary for salvation, which went against the whole clerical system and especially undermined the authority of the Pope. For this reason, Luther was excommunicated by Rome. Nevertheless, his widespread ideals, though interpreted in many ways unexpected by Luther, had consequential effects: Luther’s beliefs gave people a reason to fight for their own faith in the German Peasants War, and Lutheranism directly led to the Thirty Years’ War a century later.
Ever since Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the “New World” in 1492, Europeans, mostly Spanish and Portuguese explorers, had been rushing to plant their flags on every piece of the continent they landed on. Hernan Cortes was one of them. With less than 500 men, Cortes artfully allied with local indigenous resistance and won successive victories against the Aztec Empire in Mexico. Although the fall of the Aztec Empire was due to several reasons, including the spread of European disease and the help of La Malinche that enabled Cortes to communicate with the Aztecs, Cortes’s expedition led to the fall of the Aztec Empire in less than 5 years and brought large portions of Mexico under the Spanish crown. Cortes’s victory changed everything. It not only spread Catholicism across the Atlantic Ocean but also illustrated to the European powers the massive benefits colonization can bring. His work opened the Americas to Western colonialism.
Following Tycho Brahe’s observation of the supernova in 1572, Galileo Galilei, a physicist and astronomer during the early 17th century, had offered a paradigm shift that changed the history of science and human’s fundamental understanding of the world, both the universe and the church. With his invention of the telescope, Galilei had produced observatory results of the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, and the Milky Way that steered him to oppose the Geocentric Model of Aristotle. Aristotle’s worldview had favored the church for centuries, for it offered believers the uniqueness of being God’s children and thus fortified the church’s authority and control. Galilei’s support of the Heliocentrism and Cosimo II’s, Grand Duke of Tuscany, support of Galilei had ever led the Europeans to question their religious beliefs and advanced Europe into the Scientific Revolution.
Martin Luther, Hernan Cortes, and Galileo Galilei all offered the people a new way to view the world: Luther provided an alternative interpretation of the Bible, Cortes presented another future of colonialism, and Galilei put forward an unorthodox perspective of viewing the universe and ourselves.