Church Organization and Reform

Flashcards covering vocabulary related to medieval church centralization, monastic and mendicant reforms, religious doctrines, heresy, Jewish life in Europe, and the military campaigns of the Crusades and Reconquista.

Simony

The practice of purchasing church positions, which was a major focus of religious reform efforts around the year 1000.

Gregorian reform

An eleventh-century reform movement named after Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) that worked systematically to eliminate simony, clerical marriage, and lay control of the church.

Curia

The elaborate bureaucracy of the medieval church containing specialized departments for handling correspondence, records, finances, judicial cases, and church law.

College of Cardinals

A special body of churchmen from around Rome selected by the popes to provide advice and administrative expertise to the Curia.

Legates

Individual churchmen empowered to act on behalf of the pope to directly assert his authority in local areas.

Dioceses

Administrative territories of the church hierarchy managed by archbishops and bishops.

Cluny

A monastery in France established in 910 that pioneered monastic reform by subordinate only to the pope and independent of local lay authority.

Cistercians

A prominent twelfth-century monastic group that emphasized a simple life, agricultural improvement, and a inward spiritual focus, avoiding the elaborate liturgy of the Cluniacs.

Mendicant orders

Religious orders, also known as friars or brothers, who rejected life in a monastery to live in the world under a rule of poverty while preaching and performing charitable works.

Franciscans

The Order of Friars Minor, founded by Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), whose members rejected property and rebuilded the order based on poverty and preaching.

Dominicans

The Order of Preachers established in 1216 by Dominic de Guzman to counter heresy through systematic preaching and education.

Augustinian canons

Clergy who organized their communal life in the twelfth century based on a rule of St. Augustine to improve the quality of ministry in towns and hospitals.

Sacraments

The outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace instituted for human salvation; the church fixed their number at seven in the thirteenth century.

Transubstantiation

The miracle in the sacrament of the Eucharist where bread and wine are changed into Christ's body and blood.

Waldensianism

A reform movement begun by Peter Waldo of Lyons in 1173 that urged the church to adopt poverty and rejected the clergy as necessary intermediaries between God and humans.

Catharism

Also known as Albigensianism, a rival religion in southern France that believed in two distinct spirits of good and evil and strictly rejected material things.

Inquisition

A judicial process developed by the papacy to detect and eradicate heresy through inquiries, examinations, and trials conducted by bishops or special tribunals.

Samuel ibn Nagrela

A capable tenth-century Jewish poet and scholar who served as prime minister to the Islamic ruler of Granada.

Judah ha-Levi

A physician and masterful poet (1086–1141) who wrote 'The Khazari', a philosophical dialogue emphasizing the rational basis of Judaism.

Moses ben Maimon

Also known as Maimonides (1135–1204), a Spanish-born Jewish thinker who wrote 'The Guide for the Perplexed' and 'The Thirteen Articles' of faith.

The Crusades

A series of armed pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, beginning in 1095, conducted by European Christians to win back territory from Muslim control.

Reconquista

The successful campaigns by Italian and Iberian Christians to regain territories in the Mediterranean and Spain from Muslim control between 1050 and 1270.

Las Navas de Tolosa

A decisive 1212 military victory by Christian forces that effectively crushed Muslim military superiority in the Iberian peninsula.