The church was a pre-existing entity at the time of Constatine, already several centuries old, with ideological practice at "rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's".
While the Church after Constantine eagerly grabbed all the temporal power it could get, from the Fall of Rome the Church was temporally weak because Italy was weak, and first it lost Syria and North Africa in the Muslim conquests, then it lost the East in the Great Schism.
This made the Church maintain itself by offering a deal to the princes of Europe, especially the newly converted ones - we will legitimate and thus increase your power, if you pay homage and tribute to ours. But in most Western countries in the Medieval period, the King was one power, and the Church was another. Sometimes the relation was easy, sometimes anything but. The important thing to note is that with the exception of the Papal States, it was not the same power. This is different from the Muslim world, where the Caliph was King & Pope in one, and there never arose a papal figure to contest the power of the local king.
All this provided the background for the day that the princes wanted to free themselves from homage to the church, and and the new ideas of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation tipped the balance of power in their favor.
Now, where did you study history? |
