Pope Innocent III Capitularies

Pope Innocent III to many people is a savior of Christianity. He is thought of very highly because he was one of the most influential and powerful popes of the Middle Ages. Pope Innocent III not only made a mark on everyday citizens of his reign, but especially so to the Roman Catholics. The election of Pope innocent III happened to him at the age of thirty-seven on 8 January 1198, his real name was Lothar of Segni. Many popes before him had let the Christian values slip through their fingers, ultimately leaving no hope of salvation because of the corruption that was occurring in the Church and values being forgotten at every new pope. Pope Innocent III was the first pope to name himself the ‘Vicar of Peter’ to then name himself ‘Vicar of

All Catholics were terrified of going to Hell after they died. They were told that the only way to go to Heaven was if the Catholic Church let them in. This led to total control over the actions of the people. “Man's life on earth was merely a period of transition on the way to eternal joy in Heaven or eternal damnation in Hell. It was, therefore, of great importance how he lived his life.” (Heinonen) Thus it was extremely important for citizens to appease the Church with donations or taxes. Some peasants would work for free on Church land. Every person was required to give the church 10% of their income in a tax called a tithe. The people were told that a failure to pay tithes would result in an eternity spent in hell. The Church gained wealth because everyone was afraid of what would happen if they did not pay the Church. Also, the only source for religious information was from the Church. If a peasant wanted to hear a Bible passage, they would go to their local church and ask a priest to read them something. Since religious texts were written in languages not spoken by the common people, the peasant would not be able to actually confirm what they were being told was actually in the Bible. This monopoly on religious knowledge was frequently abused in the Middle Ages. Furthermore, there were pardoners who would pardon sins for a price. They would then take this money to the Bishop. This was just another way

In the Medieval times, the Roman Catholic Church played a great role in the development of England and had much more power than the Church of today does. In Medieval England, the Roman Catholic Church dominated everyday life and controlled everyone whether it is knights, peasants or kings. The Church was one of the most influential institutions in all of Medieval England and played a large role in education and religion. The Church's power was so great that they could order and control knights and sends them to battle whenever they wished to. The Church also had the power to influence the decision of Kings and could stop or pass laws which benefited them in the long run, adding to this, the Church had most of the wealth in Europe as the

The Catholic Church was by far the largest owner of land during the Middle Ages. While bishops and abbots occupied much the same place as counts and dukes in the feudal hierarchy, there was one important difference between the religious and secular lords. Dukes and counts might shift their loyalty from one overlord to another, depending on the circumstances and the balance of power involved, but the bishops and abbots always had (in principle at least) a primary loyalty to the church in Rome. This was also an age during which the religious teaching of the church had a very strong and pervasive influence throughout Western Europe. These factors combined to make the church the closest thing to a strong central government throughout this period.

The kings were able to control the church because the society had lost faith in the church due to the Black Death. Kings attacked the church by taxing them and controlling who the head clergy were. In older times there was no questioning of the church, so it was believed that if you prayed enough your ascension was inevitable, so if the king spoke up over the church then the church would excommunicate them and tell them they were going to hell. But when the Black Death struck, the first reaction was that if you prayed then you would be spared but that wasn’t the case because even some popes contracted the bubonic plagued. Faith was lost in the church.

The church in the Medieval era, however, was incredibly powerful and mostly unopposed. Salvation, to the religious, was and remains the most important aspect of faith. Religion without a fate after death is almost entirely hopeless and borders on nihilistic. The Catholic church used this incessant fear to fuel their political vendettas. This is made evident by the attempted squelching of the Reformation sparked by Martin Luther as well as the expulsion of the Moriscos, Jews, and Protestants from Spain. The church had successfully convinced an entire continent that the only true way to attain eternal life was through the doctrine of the church. This gave the Pope authority, power, and uncontested control over the Christian people, for a

The Church had a lot of power over the government(OI). For example the church had so much power that the Code of Chivalry has rules that talk about the church. In the Code of Chivalry it states “Thou shalt believe all that the Church teaches, and shalt observe all its directions”(Doc 5).The Code of Chivalry is important because that is the code the knights followed.That is how the politics of the Catholic Church influenced the Middle Ages of Rome.

Since warfare and disease made life unbearable, everyone from the common serfs to the prosperous king looked to Church for direction on the key to a happy afterlife (Document 9). People paid heavy taxes/gifts and devotion to guaranteed themselves in themselves a place in the Church since their births (Document 9). This showed how they had much power over all the other classes in medieval society, especially when the Truce of God was proclaimed to control knights from committing felonies on holy days (Document 4 and

For example, in Document 3, it includes,"Because of the inseparable relationship between the church and politics, many of the clergy had became as corrupt as noble families paid for church offices...People were also upset by the high taxes charged by the bishops to support the Pope and his projects." This means that because of clergy wanting money, the bishops and other clergy members raised taxes to get people to pay the Pope and the other clergy. The church addressed this problem by putting it aside for later examination. The church attempted to fix the problem but it kind of got forgotten. The clergy just went on abusing their power like Nero or Caligula in the Roman Empire. The clergy kept thinking they could get away with anything just because the Pope had the power of excommunication: he had the power to not let other human's souls go to heaven and banish them from the Church. The bishop or parish priest were very important. The priest baptized you and the few people who can actually read the bible were the parish priests. They could only read it because the Bible at that time was written in Latin. That was until Martin Luther copied it into the language the others knew: a form of German. The people of the church were so important that the others paid the high taxes until they had enough of paying them so much. Then Martin Luther came along

Throughout the central Middle Ages, Europe was characterized by the power struggle between the secular and the ecclesiastic. The question of rule by God or by man was one which arose with unwavering frequency among scholars, clergy, and nobility alike. The line which separated church and state was blurry at best, leading to the development of the Investiture Conflict in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the attempts to undermine the heir to the throne in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Four men stand out among dozens in this effort to define the powers of the lay versus that of the spiritual: Emperor/kings Henry IV and John of England, and the popes who aggressively challenged their exertions of authority, Pope Gregory VII

Throughout the time frame between 1450 and 1700 the Catholic Church had power over all European countries because the main religion everyone followed was Catholicism. One main priority

Pope Innocent III began a sequence of changes that influenced the face of secular and ecclesiastical Europe through careful use of law and political manipulation. It has been remarked that the papacy acquired and retained the most power under the leadership of Pope Innocent III during the late 12th and early 13th centuries. I plan to examine sources primarily pertaining to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and secondly to a collection of Innocent III’s papal letters. In my analysis, I hope to draw a correlation between Innocent III's actions and these actions influence on medieval society and why this period is considered to be the height of papal power since its inception.

This law, rooted in religious teachings, regulated many facets of daily life, including morals and marriages. During the later Middle Ages, the law of Europe was governed by the Church. An entire jurisdiction was exercised by the church which protected the widows, orphans and helpless and also dealt with offenses. Popes of the Middle Ages eventually had a power over all rulers, even kings and emperors. The pope was the leader of a bureaucratic structure of churchgoing men in charge of church-related business. Based in Rome, the pope was the medieval Church's leader. Church leaders such as bishops and archbishops sat on the king's council and played leading roles in government. Bishops, who were often wealthy and came from noble families, ruled over groups of parishes. The Roman Catholic Church was the supreme power during the Middle Ages. It was the stabilizing force in everyday life which kept the community framework together. The laws and rules of the land, public policies and governance of the people were all affected by religion during the Middle Ages. Any attempt at threatening Christianity by other religions was met with force and all measures were taken to spread the religion in other parts of the

The Christian religion was one of the most important centripetal forces in medieval Europe. The clergy in the Middle Ages were the religious leaders in society that were part of the church. They guided everyone, including the peasants. It included bishops, priests, monks, nuns, and the Pope. The Pope served as the church’s spiritual leader and administrator. Bishops made decisions in the church. Priests were responsible for the town’s mass and administered sacraments. Monks lived in monasteries and often wrote spiritual books such as the Bible. Today in the US, the clergy lacks a Pope. However, Europe has a Pope.

People faced the rise and the fall of the Catholic Church during the medieval time. The Popes used to hold the final authority for the church and over the state. Pope Gregory VII asserted the Pope had granted the divine power from God because Saint Peter was the first of getting this