[Sidenote: Political Differences Distinct from Religious Differences]
Similar conflicts between spiritual and temporal jurisdictions were common to all Christian states, but the national strength and the patriotism of the western monarchies caused them to proceed further than any other state in restricting the papal privileges. Despite the conflict over temporal affairs, which at times was exceedingly bitter, the kings and rulers of England and France never appear to have seriously questioned the religious authority of the Church or the spiritual supremacy of the pope. Religiously, the Catholic Church seemed in 1500 to hold absolute sway over all central and western Europe.
[Sidenote: Religious Opposition to Catholicism]
Yet this very religious authority of the Catholic Church had been again and again brought into question and repeatedly rejected. Originally, a united Christianity had conquered western Asia, northern Africa, and eastern Europe; by 1500 nearly all these wide regions were lost to Catholic Christianity as that phrase was understood in western Europe. The loss was due to (1) the development of a great Christian schism, and (2) the rise of a new religion—Mohammedanism.
[Sidenote: The Schism between the East and the West]
Eastern Europe had been lost through an ever-widening breach in Christian practice from the fifth to the eleventh century. The Eastern Church used the Greek language in its liturgy; that of the West used the Latin language. The former remained more dependent upon the state; the latter grew less dependent. Minor differences of doctrine appeared. And the Eastern Christians thought the pope was usurping unwarrantable prerogatives, while the Western Christians accused the Oriental patriarchs of departing from their earlier loyalty to the pope and destroying the unity of Christendom. Several attempts had been made to reunite the Catholic Church of the West and the Orthodox Church of the East, but with slight success. In 1500, the Christians of Greece, the Balkan peninsula, and Russia were thought to be outside the Catholic Church and were defined, therefore, by the pope as schismatics.
[Sidenote: Mohammedanism]
Far more numerous and dangerous to Catholic Christianity than the schismatic Easterners were the Mohammedans. Mohammed himself had lived in Arabia in the early part the seventh century and had taught that he was the inspired prophet of the one true God. In a celebrated book,— the Koran,—which was compiled from the sayings of the prophet, are to be found the precepts and commandments of the Mohammedan religion. Mohammedanism spread rapidly: within a hundred years of its founder's death it had conquered western Asia and northern Africa and had gained a temporary foothold in Spain; thenceforth it stretched eastward across Persia and Turkestan into India and southward into central Africa; and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as we have seen, it possessed itself of Constantinople, the Balkans, Greece, and part of Hungary, and threatened Christendom in the Germanies and in the Mediterranean.
[Sidenote: Western Heresies]
Even in western Europe, the Catholic Church had had to encounter spasmodic opposition from "heretics," as those persons were called who, although baptized as Christians, refused to accept all the dogmas of Catholic Christianity. Such were the Arian Christians, who in early times had been condemned for rejecting the doctrine of the divinity of Christ, and who had eventually been won back to Catholicism only with the greatest efforts. Then in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Albigensian heretics in southern France had assailed the sacramental system and the organization of the Church and had been suppressed only by armed force. In the fourteenth century, John Wycliffe appeared in England and John Hus in Bohemia, both preaching that the individual Christian needs no priestly mediation between himself and God and that the very sacraments of the Church, however desirable, are not essentially necessary to salvation. The Lollards, as Wycliffe's English followers were called, were speedily extirpated by fire and sword, through the stern orthodoxy of an English king, but the Hussites long defied the pope and survivals of their heresy were to be found in 1500.