Saturday, October 3, 2015

Why did Pope Urban feel that Europe had reached a turning point in its history?

The papal rule of Urban II marked a couple of significant turning points in European history. The most notable of these is his prompting of the First Crusade in 1095. Urban felt that Europeans had commitments that existed outside of Europe itself: commitments to fellow Christians in Byzantium and commitments to retake the Holy Land from the Turks. This can be seen as a turning point in the European worldview. Since the fall of the Roman Empire 500 years earlier, Europeans had been focused and concerned primarily on local matters. They had no real "foreign policy" on the type of scale brought about by the Crusades. Furthermore, the Crusaders were a combined force from many different European nations. Medieval Europe had never formed any international alliances on this scale before. By encouraging all Christians in Europe to join forces and go on this international adventure, Pope Urban was signifying that it was time for Europeans to be much less provincial in their outlook.
Urban's papacy also marked a significant turning point for the role of the Vatican in European affairs. He felt that the Pope should be more than a religious authority and reorganized his office along a more monarchical model. He restructured the Papacy along the lines of the royal court in France. He established the papal curia as an administrative body to help the Pope carry out political affairs. Urban formed alliances with European monarchs to strengthen his position and sanctioned royal marriages throughout the continent in ways politically convenient to himself. By the end of his tenure, Urban had restructured the Papacy to be a much stronger and influential institution in Europe than it had ever previously been. This can be seen as a turning point in that European affairs for the next several centuries would be dominated by the role of the Church in many ways.
https://www.versiondaily.com/role-pope-urban-ii-first-crusade/

No comments:

Post a Comment

Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?

In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...