Everyone knows that the Catholic Church was a really powerful institution during the Middle Ages, al

Everyone knows that the Catholic Church was a really powerful institution during the Middle Ages, although I think it’s not always clear why that is. R.W. Southern provides a compelling explanation of at least part of the reason - the Church filled a legal vacuum. Basically, the eleventh and twelfth centuries were full of conflict between nobles. All of these nobles were upstarts. They were rich or titled or both because, back in the distant past - say 950 A.D. - some ancestor of theirs had stolen some land or impressed some strongman and so had been granted a title. But, it being the 900′s, the record keeping wasn’t so good. So by 1150, Europe was full of dubiously-titled nobles asserting dubious claims against other dubiously-titled nobles. Somebody had to sort it all out.  The primary function of the medieval ruler was that of organizing justice and pronouncing judgement, either through his officials or in his own person. Men acquiesced in government because, whether themselves litigious or not—and most men were—they were involved in a web of conflicting claims and counter-claims which could have no end until they had been pressed as far as money and strength would allow. If this was true of secular government, it was also true of the government of the Church. The Catholic Church had an advantage because of two longstanding institutions that could be adapted to serve this judicial function: the papal legate and the church counsel. A legate was a church official authorized by the pope to make decisions. Legates would travel around a territory and decide on disputes, much like nineteenth century judge riding the circuit. On the one hand, papal legates, instead of going out at infrequent intervals for the discharge of some specific business were beginning to make lengthy perambulations over wide areas, taking up in their course whatever business came to hand. They held councils, heard disputes, pronounced judgement and remitted to Rome matters which could be brought to no conclusion on the spotThe Counsels, which primarily existed to nail down church doctrine, functioned as a court of appeals. Litigants who lost in front of the legate, would travel to Rome for a hearing in front of the pope himself. A crowd of unsatisfied litigants came to the city either at the bidding of the legate, or to appeal against his decisions. Such men required careful treatment: they were often important and nearly always sore. It would appear that their business generally waited until the Pope could have fuller counsel than was normally available to him. Hence there arose an important development in the holding of councils.During the century and a quarter which followed Gregory’s death, a vast amount of litigation found its way to Rome. In essence, most of the great cases were not much different from the dispute about the church of Craon: they had their origins in a time which had left either no documents or obscure ones ill-fitted to stand the scrutiny of a legalistic age; they had their continuance in a fanatical zeal for the rights of individual churches; and they had their end in the papal court.R.W. Southern. The Making of the Middle Ages -- source link

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