The medieval Western church: power, reform, and the seeds of protest

Across the Middle Ages the Western church became the central institution of European life, crowning kings, running universities, preserving learning in its monasteries, and shaping law and art. It was also, by turns, a reforming and a worldly institution, and Schaff's history traces both. Waves of monastic renewal (Benedict, Cluny, the friars Francis and Dominic) repeatedly called the church back to simplicity and mission. The papacy grew into a great power, at its height under Innocent III (c. 1200) and at its lowest during the Avignon exile and the Great Western Schism (1378–1417), when rival popes each claimed the throne. The Crusades (from 1095), religiously framed military campaigns to retake the Holy Land, are today widely judged, by secular and Christian historians alike, as a mixture of piety, politics, and brutal violence, including the atrocities of 1204 against fellow Christians in the East; this file names them honestly rather than defending or merely condemning. Well before Luther, calls for reform multiplied: John Wycliffe in England (d. 1384) attacked church wealth and pushed to put the Bible in English; Jan Hus in Bohemia (burned at the stake in 1415) preached similar themes. The medieval church thus carried within it both the machinery of Christendom and the recurring demand, from inside, that it return to the Gospel. That tension set the stage for the sixteenth century.