The Roman Catholic Church of the Medieval Period

The early establishment of the doctrines, dogmas, rituals, and communications of the Church, prepared the foundation upon which the power and influence of the pope would rest in the middle ages and beyond (as well as splitting the Church into its eastern and western factions centuries earlier). Catholic leaders engulfed in the Cluniac reform movement were well equipped for the expansion and solidification of the Church's hold on the world with the unified message that stressed the primary goals: the glorification of God, and the administration of spiritual needs to the faithful. Indeed, the Church, by the early middle ages,

shaped the calendar of the day and the year. It set the festivals--Christmas, Carnival, Lent, Easter, St. John's Night, Twelfth Night, Lady Day in Harvest, Halloween. It

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or on behalf of Bishop Lambert of Arras: "Whoever for devotion only, not for honour or money, shall journey to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God, to him shall that journey be reckoned as total penance. Similarly, a letter from Urban to "the faithful at Bologna" echoed the idea that penances had the potential to eradicate the most dire consequences of sin which a sinner would face after death. Of the four major crusades, only the first could be considered an unqualified "success." But at what price? Bull posits that it was a happy marriage between what were conceived of as the interests of the church as a single entity and the mundane preoccupations of thousands of discrete individuals, people who were most likely poorly equipped to understand the geopolitics of the eastern Mediterranean or the dynamics of churchmen's intellectual response to warfare, but whose pious instincts were perfectly capable of motivating a long absence from home on a dangerous and arduous undertaking. On the other hand, writing of the final conquest of Jerusalem, Mayer insists that The governor (of Jerusalem) and his retinue were the only Muslims to escape alive. The intoxication of victory, religious fanaticism, and the memory of ha
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 7192
Approximate Pages = 29 (250 words per page)

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