Protection

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Benedict Wiedemann
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Papal Authority

This chapter examines the extension of the ‘protection of St Peter’ to kingdoms in the twelfth century. When, following the Investiture Contest, kings ceased to be ‘given’ their realms by popes, rulers sought other forms of relationship with the successor of St Peter. Aragon and Portugal were received into the protection of the pope—a relationship analogous to certain monasteries and religious orders. The kings of Aragon even received rights of exemption from episcopal jurisdiction. In the mid-twelfth century, in Aragon, papal authority was weaponized by several of the contending parties in a succession dispute following the death of King Alfonso I. Papal authority thus emerges as tool of local parties, to be used to legitimize their own positions.

scholarly journals El control de los patrimonios monásticos en la Galicia moderna

2018 ◽  
pp. 7-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pegerto Saavedra ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Land Tenancy ◽  
Surface Measurements ◽  
Entire Amount ◽  
The Right

From the twelfth century on significant numbers of Benedictine and Bernardian monasteries in the region of Galicia owned great dominions that were ceded under foral arrangements to peasants. These land colonizers implemented strategies of undermining direct dominion thanks to the fragmentation, dispersion and extension of the land, along with the fact that the right to cultivate land could pass to relatives or neighbours. Moreover, the intense changes affecting the agricultural land structure in the Modern Age forced the religious orders to continually seek to control these farm lands and to clarify the obligations of the tenants. Ultimately it was not the amount of land or the surface measurements that mattered for estimating the properties, but rather the land production or rents. Mainly using the abundant documentation in the splendid Cistercian archives, this paper examines the various mechanisms that the monasteries employed in each period to seek to control their lands and rents. First were the attempts to define the delimitation of the lands (apeos). Next came efforts to transform foral land tenancy into leased land arrangements. Finally, in the last part of the Ancien Regime, prorating was used. Given the rather inefficient outcome of the delimitation of land and the failed attempts to end the foral arrangements, a cursory reading would suggest that the Galician monasteries were not very successful in their efforts. Yet their accounting indicates that they actually managed to collect almost the entire amount of their rents at the time of the disentailment and exclaustration of church lands, which is more than can be said of other religious communities throughout the Iberian Peninsula.

Papal Authority and Religious Sentiment in The Late Middle Ages

1991 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 409-428
Author(s):  
David L. d’Avray
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Financial Exploitation ◽  
Spiritual Authority ◽  
Italian Politics ◽  
Papal Authority ◽  
Papal Court

Undergraduate ideas about medieval papal history tend to take the following form. In the late eleventh and early twelfth century the papacy led a reform movement and increased its power. In the mid- to late twelfth century its spiritual authority waned as its legal activities expanded. Innocent III gave a new lease of life to the institution by extending its protection to those elements in the effervescent spiritual life of the time which were prepared to keep their enthusiasm for evangelical preaching and apostolic poverty within the limits of doctrinal orthodoxy. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, the papacy was more preoccupied with Italian politics than with the harnessing of spiritual enthusiasm. Its power and prestige remained great until the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Pope Boniface VIII was humiliated by the forces of the French King, acting with the Colonna family. The ‘Babylonian Captivity’ at Avignon, which followed shortly afterwards, was a period of grandiose claims and real weakness in relation to secular powers (especially France), of financial exploitation of the clergy, and of costly involvement in Italian wars. The Great Schism and the Conciliar Movement marked a still lower point in the religious prestige of the papacy. In the later fifteenth century the superiority of pope over council came to be generally recognized. Moreover, the papal state, in central Italy, was consolidated to provide a relatively secure base, and popes became patrons of painting and humanism. The patronage was a largely secular matter, however, and the papal court that of a secular prince. As for the popes’ control over the Western Church, it was limited, at least in practice, by the power of kings and princes over the clergy of their territories. Above all, the idea of sovereign papal authority in the religious sphere no longer had any connection with the real forces of religious sentiment and spirituality.

Monastic Possession of Parish Churches in England in the Twelfth Century

1980 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. R. Kemp
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Parish Churches ◽  
Gregorian Reform ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian Society

The rapid increase in monastic acquisition of parish churches in the twelfth century reflected a number of trends, both temporal and spiritual, in the Christian society of western Europe. It was an expression of the laity's continuing devotion to the monastic ideal, now reinforced by the foundation and spread of new religious orders, and it was in part a consequence of the redefinition of relations between the laity and the clergy following in the wake of the Gregorian Reform. More than that, however, it raised within the Church questions as to the proper relationship between the monastic clergy and the pastoral and juridical structure of the Church. To understand the phenomenon, therefore, it is necessary to examine the motives of donors of parish churches and those of the religious who received them, to bear in mind the climate of respectable opinion (both lay and-ecclesiastical) which came increasingly to deny possession of parish churches to the laity and yet could countenance their passage into the hands of religious houses, and to consider the repercussions of widespread monastic acquisition of churches in the Church at large. This article is concerned in particular to re-examine the means by which monasteries obtained grants of churches, viewed against the background of the Church's assault on lay ownership of churches and tithes, and to reconsider the evolution of the vicarage system, as the ecclesiastical authorities strove to accommodate within the mission of the reformed Church monastic efforts to exploit the churches in their possession.

Via Ascetica: a Papal Quandary

1985 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 161-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda M. Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Pope Innocent Iii ◽  
Papal Authority

‘Rescue us O Lord Pope from barbaric power and subjugation to laymen’ was the cry of despair from the clerics of Grandmont which reached Pope Innocent III about the year 1215. It indicated the growth of the appeal to Rome which took place in the Cannon Law of the twelfth century. Many other examples of an increase in papal authority occurred at this time. The extension of papal jurisdiction is one of two important developments of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christendom with which this paper will be concerned.

Scoto-Norse Kings and the Reformed Religious Orders: Patterns of Monastic Patronage in Twelfth-Century Galloway and Argyll

1995 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Churches ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Parish Churches ◽  
As If ◽  
Monastic Patronage

Raoul Glaber, the Burgundian monk and chronicler, noted in a famous passage in his Historiarum Libri Quinque how, about the year 1000, throughout the whole world, but most especially in Italy and Gaul, men began to reconstruct churches….It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches.Although Glaber was writing primarily of the Continent, the tide of religious revival that followed the coming of the millennium eventually lapped upon the shores of the most distant corners of Europe. In Scotland, the great age of church-building came a century later, and it was the twelfth century, rather than the eleventh, which was notable for the foundation of churches and monasteries on a large scale. Nevertheless, by 1200 Scotland, too, had been cloaked in a white mantle of new churches, made up of cathedrals, parish churches, and monasteries. It is the latter with which this essay will be principally concerned.The works of Professor Barrow are of the first importance for understanding the patterns of monastic patronage that brought the Benedictines, Cistercians, Augustinians, Premonstratensians, and other religious orders to Scottish soil, and for the contribution these orders made to the medieval kingdom of Scotland.

Were There Twelfth-Century Cistercian Nuns?

1999 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 824-864 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constance H. Berman
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Religious Order ◽  
Gender Neutral ◽  
Cistercian Order ◽  
History Of

It has been a truism in the history of medieval religious orders that the Cistercians only admitted women late in the twelfth century and then under considerable outside pressure. This view has posited a twelfth-century “Golden Age” when it had been possible for the abbots of the order of Cîteaux to avoid contact with women totally. Only later did the floodgates burst open and a great wave of women wishing to be Cistercians flood over abbots powerless to resist it. This paper reassesses narrative accounts, juridical arguments, and charter evidence to show that such assertions of the absence of any twelfthcentury Cistercian nuns are incorrect. They are based on mistaken notions of how the early Cistercian Order developed, as well as on a biased reading of the evidence, including a double standard for proof of Cistercian status—made much higher for women's houses than for men's. If approached in a gender-neutral way, the evidence shows that abbeys of Cistercian women appeared as early as those for the order's men. Evidence from which it has been argued that nuns were only imitating the Cistercian Order's practices in the twelfth century in fact contains exactly the same language that when used to describe men's houses is deemed to show them to be Cistercian. Formal criteria for incorporation of women's houses in the thirteenth century are irrelevant to a twelfth-century situation in which only gradually did most communities of monks or nuns eventually identified as Cistercian come to be part of the newly developing religious order.

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