Why was the church so powerful in medieval times?

Answer 1

1st AnswerOne reason the church was so powerful was the fact that clerics (church officials) were largely the only ones who could read. This meant that the common people had to rely on the priests to tell them what The Bible said, and what God intended them to do.

Since most people were illiterate, they did not have access to the works of the great thinkers, such as Greek philosophers and Roman historians. Since the ideas of most great thinkers are built on a foundation of the thoughts of other great thinkers, the common man had no means of either reading or writing great ideas that did not come from the church.

Before the invention of the movable type printing press by Gutenberg, books, scrolls, and other texts were carefully copied by church scribes who copied each page by hand. This was a very tedious and time consuming process. These copies were fragile, rare, and valuable. They simply could not be circulated among the common people, who could not read them anyway.

When Gutenberg invented his printing press, he began to mass produce pages from the Bible. People used these pages to learn how to read. Eventually, other texts were printed, and people learned how to write their own thoughts and circulate them to a mass audience. Ultimately, this led to libraries and universities - centers of great learning.

People began to question what they had been told by the church on all kinds of subjects, including science, astronomy, medicine, ethics, etc. This began the decline of the church's power and influence.

MoreAnother reason that the medieval Church was so powerful was becasue the made laws and set up courts to uphold them. Another ViewThe more I learn about the Middle Ages, the more I am impressed by the wisdom, science, and intelligence of its people.

The above answers may be conventional understanding, but the conventional understanding is supported by neither the facts nor historical record. Furthermore, they ignore the most powerful reason the Church had power, which was that it was at the center of what people believed; asking why the Church was powerful in the middle ages is in some respects analogous to asking why science is so powerful today.

As to the facts, we do not have a lot of evidence from the early middle ages, because people did not keep much in the way of records, but what records we do have do not support the idea that people were generally illiterate. Examples include the following:

• The first primary schools in the world were opened by the East Roman Empire in 425 AD with the purpose of trying to make every soldier literate. The East Roman Empire survived until 1453, and is referred to by historians as the Byzantine Empire. And its primary schools remained open until 1453. (see link below)
• We have a record that Cor Tewdws (the College of Theodosius) in Llantwit, Wales was rebuilt in 508 after its buildings had been burned down in a fire. It had been opened before, or possibly very shortly after, the death of Roman Emperor Theodosius in 395, and remained open continuously from 508 until it was closed by King Henry VIII years after them Middle Ages ended. (see link below)
• The King's School in Canterbury was opened in 596 and remains open today. Beverley Grammar School, in Yorkshire, was opened as a state supported school, in 700, and remained open during the decades when the area was controlled by Vikings; it also remains open today. There are a total of over 70 primary and secondary schools open today from the Middle Ages. The number that have not remained open cannot be know, because very few records were kept about the ones that closed. There might have been hundreds of them or more. (see link below)
• There were over 70 universities opened during the Middle Ages, starting with the University of Bologna in 1088, over 300 years before the Gutenberg Bible was printed. (see link below)
• King Alfred the Great set into motion a policy that all freemen of England be taught to read and write in English. In support of this policy, he sponsored the translation of great works from Latin into English. When he died, he was actively engaged in translating the Bible into English. (see link below)

These facts indicate that the power of the Church was not dependent on its relationship with an illiterate population. Since literacy had begun to decline in the Roman Empire of the third century, it is possible that at the time of the collapse of the West Roman Empire, its level of literacy was lower than what it became in the later half of the Middle Ages.

The nature of the Middle Ages was misrepresented very badly by later historians. First, the nature of the Early Middle Ages was misrepresented by historians of the Late Middle Ages, who wanted to inflate their own importance by making themselves the inheritors of the wisdom of Rome. So they invented the term Middle Ages to as a name for a time they regarded as ignorant. Then, the same thing was done by historians of the Renaissance to the historians of the Late Middle Ages, who appropriated the term Middle Ages for the same reason in the same way. They called architecture of the High Middle Ages Gothic, a word of derision, implying it to the sorts of barbaric things one might expect from Vandals, Visigoths and Ostrogoths. In the mean time, an era that did not leave much in the way of records about itself was unable to come to its own defense. Dead men cannot pass literacy tests.

Today, we point to the Middle Ages as a time of superstition and ignorance. But the superstitious persecution associated with the witch trials was not medieval; it happened primarily in the periods of the Renaissance and Reformation. The attempts to control science were not medieval; they too were of the Renaissance and Reformation. I remember when historians pointed at the millennialists of the Middle Ages with derision. They clearly did not believe millennialism would reemerge at the end of the twentieth century. But it did, and I have come to the conclusion that the people of the Middle Ages were no more superstitious than many people of today, especially including those who irrationally believe we know enough of science to base all our trust in it.

The power of the Church in the Middle Ages was based on a single simple fact: it represented what the overwhelming majority of the people believed. People wanted to go to heaven, so they went to church. People wanted to be good, so they invented the Code of Chivalry, congruent with their sacred beliefs, and they obeyed it. People wanted to be perceived as good, so they did not violate the Church. Even kings respected the sanctuary of churches and monasteries, and, in many lands, even felons and runaway queens could be safe in those places. A king's worst nightmare could easily have been being excommunicated, because even if he did not believe, all the oaths taken by his vassals to support him would have been rendered void, and all the treaties made with him would have been rendered invalid, and people who regarded their word as sacred would have been freed to do whatever they wanted to oppose him and support his enemies.

Answer 2

because there was a battle between the proes and the catholics about whos church was the best

i am 12 and learnt it in history at school