Before the twelfth century the law and the power of authority were frequently interpreted as being God’s punishment on mankind for its sins. With the stabilization of the feudal states and the relative peace which enabled local and long-distance commerce to develop, Europe was ripe to accept the ideas of such ancient philosophers as Aristotle who presented political institutions as the natural consequence of man’s social being—‘man is a political animal’. But whether the catastrophic or the natural interpretation of the origin of human institutions was accepted, the ultimate cause was God and consequently the established order at any given time was divinely sanctioned. Medieval thinkers and preachers did not attempt to disguise the fact that human society was stratified. They adapted and repeated a very ancient classification of the different social orders, which as it happened more or less fitted the realities of early medieval society—the well-known division of men into those who pray, those who fight and those who work.
Kitap: Bond Men Made Free
Merovenj Devri Kiliselerin Zenginleşmesi
Cathedral churches and monasteries seem to have been immensely rich by the end of the Merovingian period in the early eighth century, partly because of the enthusiasm of the early Frankish nobility for their new religion and its promise of salvation—which gifts might have been thought to buy—and partly because of lands which wealthy Roman aristocrats brought to the church as they entered its hierarchy as bishops and abbots. Following on this there was a period of spoliation of church lands, to provide fiefs for warriors, during the course of the eighth century.