Western Europe Religion Change and Continuity over Time free essay sample

During the time period from the beginning of the Roman Empire to the Crusades, there were changes and continuities in religion. After Christianity became the main religion in the Roman Empire, it slowly changed as time went on and in some areas remained the same. At the beginning of the Roman Empire the Romans were a polytheistic people. They believed in many gods, which they adopted from the Greeks in Southern Italy. The Romans copied many of the Greek gods and myths but gave them different names, for example, Jupiter was the Greek god Zeus and Mars was the god Greek god Ares. People began to worship emperors during the reign of Emperor Augustus, the first emperor. Augustus didn’t demand it but the people did it anyway. Emperor Caligula was the emperor to demand to be worshipped. A cult of the living emperor was developed as a way to increase the loyalty of the people. We will write a custom essay sample on Western Europe Religion Change and Continuity over Time or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Christianity developed in a small Roman province called Judea by a man named Jesus, a carpenter from Galilee. He preached for about 3 years before the Jewish leaders brought him to the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate. Jesus was imprisoned, condemned, and executed by crucifixion. Three days after his death, he rose up again. His followers, the Apostles, began to spread his word among the Jews trying to convince that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God and that he was resurrected. A man named, Paul of Tarsus, persecuted the Christian church at first but when Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus, he began to believe. Paul became the greatest Christian missionary in the world. He preached to the mainly to the Gentiles and many people believed. For more than two centuries, the Christian Church grew slowly but steadily. Many of the first believers were poor people, women and slaves. As the church grew and prospered, they developed a hierarchy of priests and bishops. Christians were forbidden to worship other gods. So, many early Christians were persecuted by Roman officials, who regarded their refusal to worship the Emperor as disloyalty. Despite the occasional government sponsored persecution, for example feeding them to hungry lions in arenas, and spontaneous mob attacks. The religion continued to gain strength and attract converts. By the late third century, Christians were a sizable minority within the Roman Empire and many held posts in local and imperial governments. The persecution finally stopped with the Edict of Milan in 312, when Emperor Constantine saw the vision of the cross before a major battle. He believed that the Christian God helped him and so he made Christianity the Empires official religion. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Roman nobles lost control of the papacy –office of the pope- and it became a powerful international power after the tenth century. Councils of bishops became increasingly responsive to papal direction. Regional disagreements over church regulations, difficult communications, a shortage of trained clergy and political disorder formed formidable obstacles to unifying the church. Church problems also included lingering polytheism, nepotism and simony. The church decided to unify the church by combing polytheism and heretical beliefs. For example, December 25th, the day Jesus was born, was a Pagan holiday associated with the Winter Solstice, and had significance in many local belief systems. They also built churches on sacred sites. In politically fragmented Western Europe, the pope need allies so he created the Holy Roman Empire and crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor in 962. Fights between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperors were common and they were mostly about who had more power over bishops in imperial lands. This is called investiture controversy. This was somewhat resolved in 1122 with the Concordat of Worms. The Emperor renounced his right to choose bishops and abbots or bestow spiritual symbols on them. The Pope permitted the emperor to invest papally appointed bishops and abbots. Monasticism was prominent in the religious life of almost all medieval Christian lands. People who lived in the religious communities were devoted to continual prayer, chastity, obedience and poverty. Monasteries were primary centers of learning and literacy in medieval Europe. The Crusades were from 1095 to 1204. They were armed pilgrimages to the Holy Land by Christians determined to recover Jerusalem from Muslim rule. The reforming leaders of the Latin Church, sought to soften the warlike tone society, so they created The Truce of God. This limited fighting between Christian lords by specifying the truce, such as during Lent (forty days before Easter) and Sundays. Many people made pilgrimages to the Holy Land for many different reasons, even though Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria were under Muslim control, the pilgrims were generally tolerated and protected. Despite the differences between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus asked the pope and western European rulers to help him confront the Muslim threat and reconquer what the Christians termed as the Holy Land. At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II addressed a huge crowd and told them to stop fighting amongst themselves and go to the Holy Land to fight the Muslims. So people cut cloth into crosses and sewed them unto their shirts to symbolize their willingness to march to Jerusalem. This became known as the first Crusade. The Pope Urban promised to free crusaders who had committed sins from their normal penance, the usual reward for peaceful pilgrims to Jerusalem. The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099, which was the only successful crusade. The Muslims recaptured Jerusalem in 1187. By the time of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the original religious enthusiasm had diminished to a point where the Crusaders agreed to sack Constantinople to help pay the cost of transporting the army by ship. In conclusion, there still is a pope in Rome today who stills yields a lot of power. Christianity is the most practiced religion in the world, Islam being the second. You can still find monks and nuns living in monasteries today as well.