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FC66: Rise of the medieval Papacy (c.900-1300) FC66 in the Hyperflow of History Covered in multimedia lecture #6984. Introduction: the plight of the Church in the Early Middle Ages

The 14th century was an era of catastrophes. Some of them man-made, such as the Hundred Years' War, the Avignon Papacy, and the Great Schism. These were caused by human beings, and we shall consider them a bit later. There were two more or less natural disasters either of which one would think would have been sufficient to throw medieval Europe into a real "Dark Ages": the Great Famine and the Black Death. Each caused millions of deaths, and each in its way demonstrated in dramatic fashion the existence of new vulnerabilities in Western European society. Together they subjected the population of medieval Europe to tremendous strains, leading many people to challenge old institutions and doubt traditional values, and, by so doing, these calamities altered the path of European development in many areas.

hese two were born into upper-class feudal families (Peter in Brittany in 1079, and Bernard in Champagne in 1090), and grew up in a period when, after the inconclusive ending of the so-called "Investiture Contest", both Empire and Papacy were facing severe problems-one plagued by endemic civil war, and the other by faction-fighting in Rome and the threat of rising Norman power in southern Italy.