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Sacred Foundations: how the medieval church made modern Europe
Anna Grzymała-Busse’s fine book argues that the religious powers of the
Middle Ages were fundamental in forging today’s secular institutions

‘The Fortress of the Faith Besieged by the Impious and the Heretics, Is
Defended by the Pope, the Bishops, the Monks and Doctors of the Church’,
from a 15th-century miniature © Universal Images Group/Getty Images
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Tony Barber 9 HOURS AGO
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It takes an effort of the imagination to connect with medieval Europe.
In the thousand years between the western Roman empire’s fall in 476 and
the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, government, society and
the life of the mind took forms that seem remote from the present day.
The supreme importance of religion to politics and daily life appears to
separate the Middle Ages from what is conventionally portrayed as the
breakthrough of science and reason from the 17th century onwards.

In Sacred Foundations, Anna Grzymała-Busse sets out the case that modern
Europe owes more to the medieval past than we often appreciate. The
Stanford University professor makes a bold but convincing claim: as
religious and political institutions, Roman Catholicism and the papacy
were dynamic, transformative forces in the period she analyses —
roughly, from 1000 to 1350. Whereas many historians trace the modern
state’s origins to a later era (broadly speaking, 1500 to 1800), she
writes: “The European state was born in the Middle Ages . . . The
medieval church was so influential because it was armed with superior
organisational reach, human capital, and spiritual authority.”

Grzymała-Busse’s argument may go down well with politicians and thinkers
in today’s central and eastern Europe who contend that western Europe
has recklessly lost touch with its Christian heritage. As much as
disputes over the rule of law or policy towards Russia, this clash over
values and traditions has emerged as a persistent source of friction
inside the EU.

At the same time, her book will remind all Europeans that the dividing
line between church and state was as contested in the Middle Ages as it
is today in countries such as France, with its intense debates about the
role of Islam in an avowedly secular polity. The question of who should
punish miscreant clergy greatly exercised medieval rulers, and it is
alive today in the matter of sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic church.

The church was innovative in matters of taxation and government. Taxes
collected to pay for crusades set a precedent for secular taxation

The rise of the papacy dates to the Investiture Conflict of the late
11th and early 12th centuries. Nominally about whether popes or secular
monarchs had the right to appoint bishops, it was more fundamentally a
struggle between popes and the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, a
territory largely overlapping with modern Germany. With the rediscovery
of Roman law, specifically the emperor Justinian’s Codex of 534, both
sides invested heavily in legal expertise to fight their battles. Law
schools and universities appeared, often with indispensable church
support, Grzymała-Busse writes.

The papacy asserted its strength over the Holy Roman Empire by ensuring
that the German- and Italian-speaking lands remained politically
fragmented — a hallmark of Europe’s development that did not change
until German and Italian unification in the 19th century. At the same
time, the papacy generally interfered far less in England, permitting
the growth of centralised royal rule and the common law that made the
English state distinctive in Europe.

The church was also innovative in matters of taxation and other methods
of government. Taxes collected to pay for crusades in the Holy Land set
a precedent for secular taxation. From Castile and Sicily to Hungary and
Poland, financial departments, judiciaries and chanceries, which handled
correspondence, petitions and contracts, were staffed with clergymen who
possessed the necessary skills.

Grzymała-Busse’s work draws partly on ideas set out in classic histories
such as Walter Ullmann’s The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle
Ages (1955) and Richard Southern’s Western Society and the Church in the
Middle Ages (1970). But it is a very fine book in its own right and one
with much relevance to our own times.

Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European
State by Anna M Grzymała-Busse Princeton University Press £25/$29.95,
256 pages

Tony Barber is the FT’s European comment editor

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