Medieval Church & Monasticism

The Catholic Church in medieval Europe held assets. This is worth saying plainly, because it is easy to drift into the spiritual and miss the material: the Church owned between a quarter and a third of all land in Western Europe at its peak. It ran the only functioning court system capable of crossing political boundaries. It controlled access to literacy. It collected revenue from every farming household in Christendom. It decided who could marry whom, whose children were legitimate, which oaths were binding, and whose soul was in jeopardy.

None of this means the religious dimension was cynical or secondary. The men and women who built, ran, and staffed this institution mostly believed, with complete sincerity, in what they were doing. But belief and power are not opposites, and the medieval Church accumulated both in quantities no single institution in the Western world has matched since.

Understanding how that happened requires starting not with theology but with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. When the imperial administration fractured through the fifth century, the Church was the only institution with a Latin-literate bureaucracy, an established network of communication, and a presence in every town of any size. Bishops stepped into the vacuum left by governors. Monasteries stepped into the vacuum left by schools. The Church did not plan to inherit Rome's infrastructure. It simply outlasted everything else.