The Lutheran settlement described in the previous chapter was only one current of the Reformation. Two others ran beside it. The Reformed churches of the Swiss city-republics, led first by Zwingli in Zurich and then by Calvin in Geneva, carried…
Month: October 2026
Chapter 64. Luther: Indulgences, the Ninety-Five Theses and the Princes’ Reformation
Few figures on the library’s shelves are drawn in such opposite colours as Martin Luther. To the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica he is the professor whose Theses struck “sledge-hammer blows” at the worst abuse of his age. To Monsignor Patrick O’Hare,…
Chapter 63. Morning Stars of Dissent: Wycliffe, the Lollards, Hus and the Council of Constance
Between the Black Death and the printing press, two university reformers raised most of the objections that Martin Luther would bring against Rome a century later. John Wycliffe of Oxford and Jan Hus of Prague attacked clerical wealth, the claims…
Chapter 62. Enforcing Orthodoxy: The Inquisitions and the Trial of the Templars
The end of the Cathars (Chapter 61) left the Latin Church with a permanent machinery for detecting heresy. For nearly five centuries that machinery took several forms: the medieval papal Inquisition after 1231, the Spanish Inquisition set up at the…
Chapter 61. The Dualist Dissent: Paulicians, Bogomils and Cathars
Between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries the eastern and western churches faced a run of movements that taught that the visible world was the work of an evil or lesser power, not of the good God. The Byzantine and…
Chapter 60. Holy War: The Crusades from Clermont to the Sack of Constantinople
The crusade was born where the two lines of the previous chapters met. A Byzantine emperor asked the West for help against the Seljuks, and a reforming papacy had recently claimed the right to decide which wars were holy. The…
Chapter 59. The Papal Monarchy: From Canossa to Avignon, the Western Schism and the Borgias
Between the Gregorian reform of the 1070s and the Renaissance, the Roman see turned from a client of emperors into a sovereign power. It deposed kings, ran a continental legal system, held territory and raised armies. The library’s sources read…
Chapter 58. Two Romes: Papal Primacy, Byzantine Caesaropapism and the Schism of 1054
The break between Latin and Greek Christendom is usually dated to one summer day in 1054, when papal legates laid a bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia. The sources in the library agree that the date stands…
Chapter 57. Christological Councils and the Oriental Churches: Ephesus, Chalcedon and the Great Schisms of the East
Once Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) had settled that the Son is fully God, the fifth century faced the next question: how do the divine and the human belong together in the one Christ? The quarrel began over a title…
Chapter 56. Theodosius and the Christian State: Edicts, Temples, Hypatia and the End of Paganism
Constantine had made Christianity the emperor’s religion. Theodosius I (379-395) made it the religion every subject was required to profess. Within about fifteen years came an edict defining orthodoxy for “all the various nations” of the empire, laws forbidding sacrifice…