Transcription
[Music]
All right class, welcome back to part two of our discussion on the ways in which Christian Europe was under threat. Last time we discussed the bubonic plague. This time we'll move on with the rest of the question. Though there's more of the question to go, this should go more quickly.
So, we'll talk about the spiritual and political challenges facing Western Christian Europe during this time and the ways in which society transformed as a result of these threats.
Essentially, politically, we're talking about the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the conquest of Constantinople. When it comes to spiritual challenges, we're going to discuss the Great Schism within the Roman Catholic Church and the rise of these uppity reformers like Jan Huss and John Wycliffe, who are preaching all sorts of heretical things.
When we talk about challenges and threats facing Christian Western Europe, certainly at the top of the list, politically and in some ways religiously, is the rise of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire had its origins in the collapse of the Mongol Empire in the Middle East. This is what's left of the Mongol Ilkhanate in the Middle East, which collapsed during the spread of the bubonic plague and left a power vacuum.
I mean, there's no centralized authority here; everything's in ruins. It's these folks up here, these Turkic-speaking Muslim Ottomans, who see this as an opportunity and reconstitute a massive empire in this region, far larger than this former Mongol Ilkhanate. It will go on to send shockwaves through Europe, politically and religiously.
Again, the Mongol Empire has its origins here. These people had existed while the Mongols were ruling the region. They were chafing under Mongol rule, but as soon as the Mongol Empire collapses, they begin this shock campaign throughout the 1300s and 1400s, blitzing into Europe through the Middle East, into North Africa, and across the Black Sea.
They do so rather suddenly because the Ottomans are very adept at mounted warfare, just like the Mongols. They have a history of nomadic pastoralism, so they're very comfortable moving on horseback. They're dynamic, forceful conquerors.
But unlike the Mongols, the Ottomans also had a number of advantages. They were relatively homogeneous culturally; they all adhered to one faith, Islam. They adhered largely to one language, a version of Turkic language, and they proved to be adept administrators.
So when they conquered this region, they didn't just sit there and collect taxes and be happy like the Mongols did. They traded in their horses and weapons for bureaucratic positions and ruled this region closely and effectively. It was an empire built to last. Indeed, this empire is being put together in the 1300s and 1400s. The Ottoman Empire will last until the 20th century.
In this class, when we talk about the outbreak of the First World War, the Ottomans will still be there. This was a huge deal politically and religiously for Europe. Not only are the Ottomans conquering huge swaths of Europe—over here, the Ottoman line of advance goes all the way past Greece into modern-day Serbia and Albanian regions—but the big loss was the loss of Constantinople, which was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453.
Constantinople is kind of viewed as the second Rome. Prior to the rise of the Ottomans, it was the seat of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. There's Western Catholic Roman Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy with their own pope or pontiff. Just like there's a pope in Rome, there's an Orthodox pontiff in Constantinople.
But in 1453, Constantinople, one of the greatest cities in all of Christianity, was seized by not just conquerors, but Muslims. This was no small thing; it was a tremendous disruption to the peace and stability of Europe. The individual responsible for the conquest was Sultan Mehmet II, known as the Conqueror.
Here we see a depiction of the siege of Constantinople, which was no easy task. Constantinople was probably the most heavily fortified city in the world at this stage, surrounded by water on three sides. It took them more than a century of expansion before the Ottomans came back and took Constantinople.
The other remarkable thing about the Ottomans is that, while the Mongols were incredibly land-bound—nomadic pastoralist warriors who conquer things on land and then stay on land and don't really engage in trade or exploration overseas—the Ottomans very quickly took to the sea.
They constituted in the Eastern Mediterranean the most powerful navy in the region, fueled by these huge war galleys, these oared ships that could patrol trade routes and pick off trade ports. Once the Ottomans began expanding at sea in the 14th and 1500s, they would claim the best trade ports, put in their own administrators, and essentially shut these ports out of the old Venetian and Genoese European trading networks.
Slowly but steadily, the Ottomans were cutting Europe off from its direct access to the Silk Roads. This was hugely disruptive when it comes to European commerce.
So you can see here the spread of the Ottomans was a threat politically, religiously, and commercially to Europe. Lastly, there are divisions within Christianity itself. There are a number of ways in which Christianity in Europe was fracturing.
Up to this point, I would say Western Catholic Christianity, headed by the pope, was probably one of the most refined, potent power structures in all of Europe. It had centralized authority in Rome, in the office of the pope. It had a whole staff of administrators, cardinals, and bishops, and it had a whole army of local religious officials in bishops and priests, which would filter out into all the various towns and villages of Europe.
They all had this hierarchy of reporting up the chain to the pope. The pope would make a decree, and it would filter all the way down to your local bishopric and even your local church. The power and reach of the church is awesome; it is immense. It comes right down to the daily lives of Christian people who attend church.
In this way, the church was able to infiltrate sovereign kingdoms and later on nations, where a king would claim sovereignty over his territory. But inside a king's territory would be the church, with extensive church lands and monasteries, and the churches themselves, which did not belong to the king. They belonged to the pope, who would collect fees and taxes from them.
It's just remarkable, the power of the church. But things were not easy at the top of this power pyramid. We don't need to go into the details, but we'll just begin the story in the early 1300s. The papacy had been relocated from Rome to France. There's a lot of political dealings behind that. The French king had managed to appoint a French pope, so they relocated the papacy to Avignon in France.
But in 1378, the office of the pope, through again political back-dealing and so forth, was moved back to Rome, its rightful home. Shortly after the office of the pope was moved back to Rome, the reigning pope died. The College of Cardinals, these religious counselors directly under the pope, were tasked with selecting the next pope, as they do.
But being in Italy now, in Rome, the College of Cardinals elected an Italian pope. This greatly upset France. When the French cardinals returned home to France, they said, "Well, we're kind of pressured into picking an Italian. We regret our decision. Can we undo that?" The Italians kind of said, "No take-backs; he's the pope now."
What ended up happening is almost farcical. The French cardinals back in France elected a new pope, Clement VII, and put him back in office at the old headquarters in Avignon. The newly appointed Italian pope, Urban VI, refused to recognize this new French pope. Likewise, Clement VII in Avignon refused to recognize the Italian pope.
Just like that, in the 1370s, we now have two popes. This is known as the schism, or the Great Schism. Don't get this confused with the split between Catholicism and Orthodoxy; that's also called the Great Schism. This is a schism within the Western Catholic Church, whereby you have a pope reigning in Italy and a pope reigning in France, both claiming to be the rightful heir to Saint Peter.
Europe is then cut in half. If you are a head of state—a king, a queen, a count, a duke, whatever you are—you have to pick: are you going to support the French pope or fall in line with the pope in Rome? This was a predominantly political choice; there's very little spiritual nuance here.
Surprised? Not at all. The French king supported the French pope in Avignon, and rulers in Italy supported the Roman pope. Then it just filters on from there. If you're an enemy of France, you're not going to support the French pope. So England, which is fighting the Hundred Years' War with France, switches sides and swears allegiance to the Roman pope.
If you're Scotland, which isn't getting along well with England at this time, you'll support the French pope because you're trying to ally yourself with France. It's just all political filtering out from here.
Things get even worse; I mean, this is almost like a soap opera. In 1409, the College of Cardinals from Italy and France came together in a meeting to undo this. They said, "Let's pick a new pope to be the new one pope." So they did, and they elected Alexander V.
But the pope in France and the pope in Rome refused to recognize this new third pope, and now we have three popes starting in 1409. I'll talk about how this was resolved in just a second, but we need to unpack this one last term here: this notion of conciliarism.
This was a huge debate within Western Christianity and was in no small way bound up in this schism. There's a long-standing debate within the church as to who holds supreme power: is it the pope or is it a council of experts, like a College of Cardinals or some sort of deliberative body? Where does supreme authority rest within the church?
The pope would say supreme authority rests with me. Lower-ranking officials in the church would say, "No, no, no; councils hold supreme authority because, after all, popes are selected by councils, and the pope is just one person. They can't know everything in scripture and all the laws and everything like that. You need a council of experts to guide the pope."
The pope disagreed, and things like the College of Cardinals disagreed. This debate of conciliarism is largely why we have three popes starting in 1409, because these popes say their powers are supreme, while councils are saying, "No, no, no; the popes we pick—we picked them; we have final say."
Also coming to a head at this exact same time, as you get two and three popes, you get a number of these uppity reformers—humble priests and monks in some cases—who preach these wild, radical ideas that threaten the very foundations of power within the church.
Your book talks about two of them, so we'll just go over them. First was John Wycliffe in England. His probably most radical idea was urging his king, the King of England, to confiscate all church lands. He said, "This is not right that the papacy in Rome or France or wherever it may be gets to operate churches and estates within your realm. That should belong to the king."
He also urged the King of England to appoint priests himself—priests and bishops—and he should select priests and bishops who were pious, who followed a life of poverty and humility, and were experts in scripture. Up to this point, those appointments were made by the pope, and they also didn't always pick the best people.
Probably even more radically than all this, John Wycliffe began translating the Bible into English. Up until this point, the Bible could only ever be written in Latin. John Wycliffe's argument was that very few people read Latin. It should be in English so anybody could read it.
The church was very much against this, and this English translation he made of the Bible—here's the frontispiece of it—the church kind of had a monopoly on power through the Bible. If an expert in Latin in the Bible is the only person that can translate scripture for you, you have to go to the church to hear what your priest or bishop has to say about the Bible. You can't read it for yourself.
But if it's sitting there in plain English translation like this one, anybody could read it and start interpreting the Bible. That is very dangerous in the eyes of the Catholic Church. I know this doesn't look like English; this is a version of early English, the same English that the Canterbury Tales were written in. It's Middle English, and you can kind of read it. It says, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, son of God."
That was a mess, but yeah, you can kind of read it. Interestingly enough, this was a huge threat. If just some priest can go around interpreting and translating the Bible for the masses to read, the church stands to lose tremendous power locally.
John Wycliffe was immediately named a heretic, an enemy of the church. He wasn't the only one, though. John Huss adopted many of John Wycliffe's ideas, reign in the clergy, stress local languages in the instruction and translation of the Bible, and limit the power of the church.
John Huss's main arguments included that the Eucharist and mass should be offered free of charge and open to all Christian followers. Up to this point, it was just the clergy that really received communion. He did get many secular followers, and the church viewed this as very, very dangerous.
To combat all these problems—two popes, three popes, conciliarism versus the authority of the pope, and these uppity reformers like Wycliffe and Huss—there was the ultimate council called the Council of Constance. It lasted for four years. It was a meeting of all the top minds within the Christian church. The pope was in attendance, along with all the cardinals, various biblical scholars, and so forth.
The idea was to rectify all these problems dividing Christianity. The first thing the Council of Constance did was dissolve all current papal offices and elect one new true pope. You don't need to know this, but that was the Italian Martin V. The Great Schism, therefore, ends with the Council of Constance.
The Council of Constance also issued a decree stating that when it came to the debate on conciliarism—the supreme authority of councils versus the pope—they argued that councils hold supreme authority, even over the pope. Funny enough, the pope they just elected, Martin V, disagreed with them and said, "No, the pope holds supreme authority."
It just goes back and forth. The third thing they did—there were many, but the third big thing they did—was crack down on these reformers. John Wycliffe had since died of natural causes over in England, but the Council of Constance ordered that his remains be dug up, pictured here, his bones burned, ground to ash, and then thrown into the river.
That is how dangerous they thought the ideas of John Wycliffe were; he could not become a martyr. People could not go and find his grave and worship there. Jan Huss got it worse. He was invited to the Council of Constance; he was still alive at that time and was asked to defend his ideas and recant some of the more heretical ideas he had.
He refused, and for his troubles, he was burned alive by order of the Council of Constance. So you can see here, Christianity—Western Christendom—still a formidable source of power and influence in Europe, but man, is it going through a shaky period in the 13th and 1400s.
Okay, that concludes our lecture. So sorry for rambling on again so much. Proceed with the module; there'll be a brief quiz over the content of these two lecture videos, a brief quiz over the content of your reading, and that should about do it.