Medieval Religion for kids - monks, nuns, cathedrals, heresy, catholics, jews, and islam
Medieval Religion
Mary window at Chartres Cathedral
People think of the Middle Ages as a very religious period, when
the
Christian Church
was the most important institution and everybody prayed all the time.
Certainly this is the time when the great
cathedrals
of Europe were built, and also when the Church began the great universities
at Paris, Tubingen, Cambridge, and Oxford. This is the time when the
Pope might
excommunicate
a king, and when the king might be very upset about it. Some of the
most powerful men and women in the Middle Ages were involved with the
Catholic Church.
Cimabue: Madonna and Child (1100's AD)
But what is new about all this is really the idea that religion could
have an identity separate from the rest of reality, from the rest of
the world. In the ancient world, the
gods
and their
sacrifices
were so much a part of everyday life that there is no way to separate
religious activities from any other kind of activities. All schools
taught about the gods, all
meals
were sacred to the gods, and all meat was sacrificed to the gods, and
pretty much all
politicians
were also priests, while the
Roman
emperors were gods themselves. In the Middle Ages, this changes
only in that it is now possible to separate the religious from the secular
world: both remain very powerful.
One result of identifying religion as a separate thing from politics
was that it became important to people that everyone believe the same
things that they did. Many people believed that they could only go to
Heaven if everybody around them was a good
Christian
too, so if you believed differently from them, you were forcing them
to go to Hell. But in fact Catholicism was not the only form of Christianity
during the Middle Ages, and Christianity was not the only faith that
people followed either. Most people in Europe and in Turkey were Christians
(or, in the 400's and 500's
AD,
Arians).
Most of the people in Western Europe were Catholics, while those of
Eastern Europe and Turkey
were mostly Orthodox. But there were also many
Jews
throughout Europe at this time, and a fair number of
Muslims
as well. And in the
early
Middle Ages, many people in the countryside were still following
the old
Greek and Roman gods.
Because Christians wanted everyone else to be Christian as well, they
often got into fights with people of other faiths. Sometimes Christians
tried to get rid of all
the Jews living near them, either by converting them or by killing
them or by making the
Jews move somewhere else. Sometimes Christians tried to force people
to abandon their old Greek
and Roman gods. Sometimes Christians led crusades
against the Muslims in
Spain and in West Asia, to try to push the Muslims out of Seville and
Jerusalem and have Christians living there.
Other times the Christians fought with each other, because they disagreed
about the exact details of what a Christian should believe. If
you thought someone was a bad Christian, you called her a heretic (HERR-eh-tick),
and what she believed was a heresy (HERR-ess-ee).
One heresy that a lot of people followed in the 400's AD was the Manichaean
heresy. A later heresy was the Albigensians, in the 1200's.
