The church in the game!

[stibogis]

how will the churchs power be handled in the game?

a) will the church hold power over the king?
b) will the church be able to bann the king?
c) will the king hold power over the church in his country?
d) can kings create archibishops or must the pope do that?
e) can the church say no to crown kids borned outside of the kings marriage?
f) can they confenscate the royal estates, if the king gets a non religious?
g) if the king gets banned by the church can he get rid of the bann
h) will the king be able to take earth from the church?
i) will the church have large estates bigger than the kings as they did have historically?
j) can the king if he does not like the archbishop in his country proclame a new one that is more likely to co operate with him in political matters?

 

[crazy canuck]

I am particularly interested in whether the game will deal with the great struggle between church and state over which powers should belong to the secular rulers and which should be the perogative of the church.

To give you an idea of what I mean I can do no better then to quote from Harold Berman's book "Law and Revolution: the formation of the Western Legal Tradition:

"The term legal system is used here to mean something narrower and more specific than law in general, or what may be called a "legal order." There was a legal order in every society of the West prior to the eleventh adn twelfth centuries, in the sense that there were legally constituted authorities that applied law. Indeed, at no time in their history did the peoples of Western Europe lack a legal order: the earliest written records are collections of laws, and Tactitus, writing in the first and second centuries A.D., describes Germanic assemblies that acted as courts. Also the church from very early times had declared laws and had established procedures for deciding cases. Yet, the legal rules and procedures which were applied in the various legal orders of the West in the Period prior ot the late eleventh and early twelve centuries were largely undifferentiated from social custom and from political and religious institutions. No one had attempted to organize the prevailing laws and legal institutions into a distinct structure. Very little of the law was in writing. There was no legal literature. Law was not consciously systematized....

In the late eleventh and early twelve centuries all this changed....In every country of the West there were created professional courts, a body of legislation, a legal profession, a legal literature, a "science of law". The primary impulse for this development came from the assertion of papal supremacy over the entire Western church and of the independance of the church over secular control. This was a revolution, declared in 1075 by Pope Gregory VII; the papal party and the imperial party fought it out in bloody wars for almost fifty years, and it was only after almost one hundred years, in 1170, that the martyrdom of Thomas Becket sealed the final compromise in England."

The book provides an excellent detailed examination of how this conflict between church and state formed many of the legal and social institutions and norms we take for granted today.

At the very least I hope the game has some events regarding this struggle.

 

[stibogis]

do you think the church will be dealt with diffrently in constantinople, since the emperor there hold as much power over the church there as the pope in west?

 

[crazy canuck]

Originally posted by stibogis
do you think the church will be dealt with diffrently in constantinople, since the emperor there hold as much power over the church there as the pope in west?

I hope it will but as with many things about CK without knowing more about the game it is difficult to discuss how this might be done.

 

[Patricius]

Until the eight-century (Gregory III and his immediate successors and predecessors) were almost as closely controlled by the Byzantine emperor and had to have their elections approved by him - only geography and the more precarious Byzantine position in Italy preserved a degree of autonomy. If the Pope defied the emperor the Exarch in Ravenna or local Byzantine military aristocrats in Rome dealt with him severely. After the Lombard invasion that saw Gregory III having to bail out the Exarchate and years of heavy taxation that weakened the loyalty of local notables this ended with the Merovingians and later the Carolingians replacing the Byzantine emperor as patron. When Gregory III denounced Iconoclasm Papal land in Calabria and Sicily was confiscated and Papal jurisdiction in the latter place and Illyricum was transferred to Constantinople. After that, the Papacy had to seek other friends and the Franks became those friends.

I wonder will the jurisdiction of Rome, Constantinople and the other Patriarchates (the Papacy believe that it was all ultimately under its authority) be a part of the game in the way that, say, the Holy Roman Empire is. Will the Byzantine Empire have the chance to reassert authority over the Papacy and Italy and will ecclesiastic disputes be handled through events or allowed to come about and be resolved in a more organic way (that probably is unlikely)?

The answer to the question will come when the developers indicate how such disputes as the Investiture Contest over who had the authority to invest a bishop with his see will be simulated. It was resolved by the Concordat of Worms of September 1122 that separates the temporal aspects of a see like its land from its spiritual element. The emperor could witness though not interfere in elections and would then invest the bishop with a sceptre representing the temporal possessions of a see. Events are the most likely routes for the Investiture Contest and the like. Regarding those questions only the most powerful rulers (or the most local like Roman nobles) like the Holy Roman Emperor or the King of France could effectively bend the Papacy to their will. So if the game follows history the kings effectively control elections at the start but after reforming Popes like Gregory VII (1073-1085) and the resolution of the Investiture Contest preferment to sees (roughly the correct term) increasingly was a Papal prerogative. Events are multi-choice so assuming that events are used it probably will be possible for certain rulers to defy the Papacy. Obviously the developers can only those questions definitively so some waiting is unfortunately necessary.