What Leader and Events of the Middle Ages Made Kings and Popes so Powerful?

The Papal Deposing Power

1585 BCE

The most powerful tool of the political authority claimed by and on behalf of the Roman Pontiff, in medieval and early modern thought, amounting to the assertion of the Pope's power to declare a Christian monarch heretical and powerless to rule.

Joan of Arc

1430 BCE

Joan of Arc is a national heroine of France. She was a peasant girl who, believing that she was acting under divine guidance, led the French army in a momentous victory at Orléans in 1429 that repulsed an English attempt to conquer France during the Hundred Years' War.

The Battle of Orleans

1428 BCE

It was the French royal army's first major military victory to follow the crushing defeat at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and also the first while Joan of Arc was with the army.

The Divine of Rights

1400 BCE

The right of a sovereign to rule as set forth by the theory of government that holds that a monarch receives the right to rule directly from God and not from the people.

The Crusades

1099 BCE

The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these Crusades are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that were intended to recover Jerusalem and its surrounding area from Islamic rule.

Charlemagne and the Pope's Relationship

800 BCE

In his role as a zealous defender of Christianity, Charlemagne gave money and land to the Christian church and protected the popes. As a way to acknowledge Charlemagne's power and reinforce his relationship with the church, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans. The Pope's motivation for crowning Charlemagne was to give the papacy and the church implicit authority over the empire.

Charlemagne

768 BCE

He founded the Holy Roman Empire, stimulated European economic and political life, and fostered the cultural revival known as the Carolingian Renaissance.

The Start of the Papacy

590 BCE

At the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which was the beginning of the rise of the bishops of Rome to not just the position of religious authority, but the power to be the ultimate ruler of the kingdoms within the Christian community.

Pope Gregory

540 BCE

One of the greatest medieval popes, later canonized, he was a man of intense conviction and will. He vigorously initiated reforms and asserted the papal claim to primacy of jurisdiction in the Church.

Rome Becomes the Center of Christian Faith

313 BCE

During the early history of Christianity, Rome became an increasingly important center of the faith, which gave the bishop of Rome (the pope ) more power over the entire church, thereby ushering in the era of papal supremacy.