Page 219 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 209
papacy possessed the moral authority to undermine its opponents, without
possessing the military means to conquer them. Consequently, the papacy was
forced to rely upon others to take up arms on its behalf, and this sometimes led to
a positive incitement of fissiparous elements opposed to the nation-building,
centralizing strategies of medieval monarchies. Thus, the papacy played a
leading part in deliberately provoking feudatories to oppose the German
monarchy during the long drawn-out conflict over control of ecclesiastical
appointments, thereby contributing to the growing instability of Germany and
North Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The development of new communications under ecclesiastical control had a
destabilizing impact in another, more indirect way. The ecclesiastical hierarchy
exploited its control over medieval media to build up monarchical power, which
provoked a feudal reaction throughout medieval Europe. Although the initiative
often came from medieval rulers, they found in the clergy willing and skilled
agents in the ideological reconstruction of their authority, partly because the
traditional feudal conception of kingship, and the indigenous northern European
traditions from which it derived, constituted a powerful negation of the ideology
and new social order which the ecclesiastical authorities sought to impose.
According to papal ideology, you will recall, all power descended from God and
was institutionalized in the form of law-giving by divinely appointed monarchies
under the jurisdiction of the papal emperor with absolute authority over the
children of God. But according to indigenous feudal tradition, all power
ascended from below: the monarch was not an absolute ruler, but the first amongst
equals bound by the reciprocal obligations of the feudal contract and constrained
by natural law enshrined in custom. The early medieval institution of the
monarchy was thus a functioning denial of the impersonal ecclesiastical order
which the papacy proclaimed, the embodiment of an older, oral ideological
tradition that directly challenged the premises of papal ideology.
The ecclesiastical hierarchy sought to refashion the institution of the monarchy
through learned tracts, sermons, official pronouncements, liturgical symbolism
and ritual. Thus, numerous innovations were made in royal coronation
ceremonies, for instance, during the period A.D. 400–1300, in an attempt to
suppress the traditional feudal conception of kingship and establish in its place a
divine-right monarchy whose power derived through the mediation of the church
(Kantorowicz, 1957; Ullmann, 1969, 1975 and 1978). The person of the monarch
was deliberately invested with sacred magic properties, with the result that
throughout much of Europe the superstition developed that kings could cure
scrofula merely by touching its victims. Even armed resistance to the king,
unless he was deposed by the Church, was defined by clergy as an act of
sacrilege against the Lord’s anointed. In addition to reinterpreting the legitimacy
of the monarchy, the clergy also played a central role in developing court
administrations as effective agencies of authority.
This concerted attempt to transform the position of medieval monarchs in
accordance with the interests and ideology of the ecclesiastical order posed a