n Cameron’s words, “the Christianity of the late Middle Ages was a supple flexible, varied entity, adapted to the needs, concerns and tastes of the people who created it” and “if it were only a question of piety and worship, we should be hard put to find signs of real mass dissatisfaction with the Church.” The problem comes with the tangle of duties within the Church and the corruption of the hierarchy within the Church.
A modern observer would see the Church has having a religious function that had several basic components. At a parochial level, the Church served its adherents by ministering to them, both in life and in death and in addition, by offering to them the chance to attain a higher level of holiness unreachable outside holy orders. However, by the sixteenth century, these had been disrupted. In the Middle Ages, the church was the custodian of the skill of literacy – a role retained well into the Early Modern period because of the failure of bureaucracy to move into the hands of the laity. Indeed, after the reunification of the Papacy, Martin V pushed for an increase of papal prestige by taking on the organisation of Europe’s bureaucracies. This laid unsustainable pressure on the church as it cold neither abandon its role nor find sufficient viable capital to sustain itself. As a result, the low-level clergy were forced to live on very meagre means, an effect that led to priests needing to raise their own capital, often by abuse of their status and privileges. The predicable problems caused by this inflamed the sensitivities of the lay public.
An example of ecclesiastical control over what we see as secular domains include the universities. Universities were notably ecclesiastical in nature, the majority being founded by papal bulls and most of the rest by senior clerics. Wittenberg, an exception in that it was founded by a secular patron, had three higher faculties; theology, law and medicine. Theology was run, controlled and monitored by churchmen and much of the law course was based on Canon Law. The rush for resources within the church disrupted the structure of the church to a notable extent.
In the twelfth and thirteenth century, clerics were financially self-supporting bureaucrats useful to government for their cheapness.
The church was in theory a hierarchy from the Pope, through the College of Cardinals to the archbishops and bishops and then to the parishes. However, the system was never so simple. From the very top, right through to the simplest parish priest, there were issues that needed resolving.
The Church’s most obvious target was the Pope. It must also be remembered that the Papacy was a post dominated by Italians, run by Italians, and with two exceptions in the era 1494 to 1660, held by an Italian. In 1500, 21 of the 35 cardinals were Italian. Moreover, the system of elections of Popes opened an opportunity for Cardinals to sell votes or set up vote-rigging schemes, so diminishing the respect of the Papacy further. That eight Carafa family members took the papacy, seven Gonzagas, four Colonnas, four Farnese, seven Medici and eight Della Rovere would only serve to diminish the Papal reputation further. These supposed advisers, when not seen as corrupt, were seen as coerced lackeys. Corruption, embezzlement and treason against the Pope were all charges brought against Cardinals by the head of state of the “Lands of St. Peter.” Attempts to reform the College of Cardinals came to nothing as plans laid in the fourteenth century for a proportional transcontinental College were abandoned. The aristocratic nature of the College is clear not only from the number of famed houses represented in the College (reflected in the number of Popes of those houses elected by the College) but maintained by the Cardinals’ need of substantial private incomes to support themselves.
As the head of western Christendom and the ruler of the Papal States, the Pope had a great many conflicts of interest, and owing the Cardinals nothing after election, the Pope’s family’s dynastic objectives often became a primary consideration after his coronation, as the relative security of the Papal seat allowed them to exploit their position without fear of repercussions. Indeed, at least four Popes recognised children of their own. Alexander VI promoted the cause in the Romagna of his son, Cesare Borgia, whilst Leo X reinstated his house, the Medicis, in Florence and made his nephew Duke of Urbino. The Medici expulsion of 1527 had much to do with the failures of Clement VII, a family member, just as his subsequent successes would bring them back to power. The short average term length and lack of continuous dynasty led to a confusing and inconsistent set of policies as the elected autocrats each used their positions to promote their own interests.
Having exhausted self-interest as a motive, Popes concerned themselves with the need to increase the Church’s revenues, to maintain the Papal absolutism and to regain control of the Papal states, where supposed “Papal vicars” had set up dynasties: the affairs of the average Early-Modern Pope were certainly more worldly than spiritual. The papacy’s embroilment in war with other states did not help its pristine image, nor did forgeries claiming that Constantine left the popes great wealth “found” in the 1440s.
The bolstering of the Papal seat, the reconstitution of the Papal States, the building schemes and the Papal bureaucracy were all expenses that needed meeting. The rebuilding of St. Peters necessitated a massive sale of indulgences, a source of revenue exploited in addition to such sources as tithes and other temporal revenues. Land, mines, fisheries, tolls, ports and the church taxed all other sources of wealth. In theory, lay gifts to the church were always feasible, but states disliked the amount of land held by the Church, as it ate away at the land available for supporting the aristocracy. New money from the aristocracy was almost always for fashionable purposes in any case. Land and money were never endowed to help the church in general, but always to fund a new type of order, or to maintain a chancery priest and so on.
The reconstruction of Papal power, both in Italy and outside, was another major issue. The papacy’s relationship with other nations, thanks possibly to its abilities to switch sides with different houses holding the throne in successive years.
The council at Basel of 1433-7 was a good example of the conclilliar movement’s attempts to strip the Popes of their power and their financial resources although the council was condemned and the bull “Execrabilis” denounced such “rebellion” and fictional claims of “rights of appeal” to the Pope, in 1511-2, Louis XII attempted to impeach Julius II resulted in a council at Pisa. This use of council was a mark of the influence of the Concilliary movement, which saw the Pope not as a divinely appointed successor to St. Peter, but as merely as the Bishop of Rome. The movement for concilliar Christianity failed, as its challenge upon the supremacy of the Papacy faltered. The Pisa Council resulted in the reactionary Fifth Lateran Council (1512-7). The Council is important in that it showed the Church’s true focus and its lack of drive. Strongly Italian, the council was almost entirely political in its discussions and the lack of perceived urgency is clear as regards the future of the church’s unity, as it was not until 1521 that the council’s findings were published.
The Papal councils’ discussions were, however, often symptomatic of problems lower down in the church. The Papacy was often blamed for things that it could not influence, even in countries where the power of appointment had slipped from its grasp, such as in Spain. Having said that, although its power remained strong in Germany and in Italy, it was not used effectively and reforms were not implemented even in these areas. Clerical absenteeism was a major problem that needed addressing for example. The Council of Trent reasserted the doctrine that bishops should reside in their dioceses and travel around the diocese in order to check on the progress of the local clergy. However, despite this reassertion, as late as 1560, 70 of the 250 Italian bishops resided in Rome. Absenteeism was encouraged by another banned activity, pluralism, which occurred above all in the Holy Roman Empire, where eight or so archbishops and around forty bishops were also local territorial princes. In France, Henri de Guise held seven benefices (with an annual income of 300,000 livres) and de Richilieu’s benefices achieved much the same level of earning. However, even these men pale in comparison to de Mazarin, whose 21 abbeys generated one third of his two million livres annual income. Whilst royal appointments could evidently be dubious and political in their aims, it is perhaps surprising to see the set-up of Venal Offices – offices specifically designed to allow wealthy young men to buy some way into the heights of the hierarchy. In 1525, the Datary took over 2.5 million gold florins in payment for these offices. It must be remembered that such high level corruption across the Church was not a cause of great unpopularity. Although the Italian dominance of the College of Cardinals would later spur the German nationalist aspect of the Reformation, the Church kept a very strong popular following.
Naturally, the pattern of abuses lower down in the church varies from area to area, but in general, the conservative countryside showed worse discipline than the urban areas. In the diocese of Strasbourg, the number of clerical offences, from breaching vows of celibacy to acts of violence, decreased before the Reformation. Pluralism was a necessity for most priests as the distribution of wealth to the parishes was so uneven, and in some places training was also absurdly poor. The imposition of tithes to support a priest never seen in the parish was an important cause of discontentment. In Venice it is known that there were priests who did not say the offices and Mass regularly, and records of canonical proceedings for gambling, sexual and other offences show a general ignorance about what was expected of the clergy. 3 percent of the population of Venice took holy orders, so a low standard of discipline is perhaps to be expected, but the proportion of the population was even higher elsewhere.
The problem of tithes payable to absentee or untrained priests was very big. The power to excommunicate or interdict people or areas should they fail to pay was a great incentive for payment. In 1529 it was written that “priests look so narrowly on their profits that the poor wives must be countable to them of every tenth egg, or else she… shall be taken as a heretic.” Most vicarages had a small “glebe” where the clergy could grow some crops, and even make a surplus to sell on at market. The result of this was that occasionally, production tithes were payable to a priest who was a competitor at market.
The resevoir of problems with the church were not so much causes of bitterness or anger so much as hostages to fortune to be used as a casus belli if the church became unpopular.
Ultimately, the best way of measuring satisfaction with the church is in contemporary literature and activity. The rise of Waldo, Wyclif, Hus and the Lollards suggests some dissatisfaction with the church, although the failure of these movements to spread suggests a local interest group at work rather than an international one. The Hussites drew their strength from the martyrdom of Jan Hus, and the failure of the movement to spread far out of the Czech-speaking regions is not only a reflection of the lack of translated Hussite material (which was available in Germany, and of which Luther was given a copy) but also of the entrenched interests in the church elsewhere and in Hussitism within Bohemia. Equally Waldenism remained an alpine movement and the Wycliffites and Lollards were ineffective, small groups.
Erasmus wrote in Moriae Encomium a biting satire on monasticism and contemporary corruption, in his Novum instrumentum omne on contemporary ecclesiastical practises and in Julius Exclusus about the “warrior pope” Julius II. Despite having written these, Erasmus was no reformer and was merely counting the hostages to fortune left by the church as opposed to actually acting on them. His attack on Luther in Diatribo de libero arbitrio never left his adherence to the old church in doubt. Although Erasmus believed in the philosophia Christi, and famously said that “monkery is not piety”, attacks on him soon gave way to attacks on Luther by the theologians of the Carmelites, Dominicans and Fransiscans who were notably offended by his attacks on the monastic movement.
Ultimately, the church left itself in a vulnerable position and open to attacks, but it was usually satisfying to its members.
