How did the sale of indulgences by the church be so angry that it led to the Reformation? Or because of the struggle between kingship and ecclesiastical power.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="3" > the rebellion of the kings</h1>
The core of the struggle between the king and the ecclesiastical power is a money word, mainly tithe, and whoever has the right to appoint bishops will be taxed.
The Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, in 1073, stipulated that in his empire, all bishops were appointed by him, so Pope Gregory VII immediately announced the excommunication of Henry IV, and you could not sit on the throne. Henry IV ran to the Pope's Castle of Canossa and knelt in the snow for three days and three nights. This is the famous canosa insult.
King Philip IV of France, in 1305, sent someone to Rome to beat up the Pope, who died not long after. So the cardinals elected a French bishop as pope, and within a few years the pope ordered the entire holy see to move from Rome to Avignon, known in history as the "Prisoner of Avignon". In this way, the King of France not only had the power to appoint bishops in France, but even levied taxes on ecclesiastical property. The papacy moved to Avignon, and the obvious consequence was the loss of prestige, and the pope's words were ignored outside of France.
This was so noisy until 1377, with the secret instigation and help of the German Emperor, Pope Gregory XI led the Holy See back to Rome, but he returned a year later and died, after which the Pope has been elected to create an embarrassing situation in which three popes reign at the same time. By 1414, the Holy Roman Emperor had deposed all three popes and re-elected a new pope, and the farce of the three popes was over.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="12" > the indulgence line</h1>
After this battle, the church's people collapsed, and its prestige in the hearts of the people plummeted. By 1453, the Eastern Roman Empire had been wiped out by the Ottoman Empire! Scholars from the Eastern Roman Empire who had read the classics came to Rome, and the Roman Church immediately realized that the opportunity for the salted fish to turn over had come, and quickly put the culture of ancient Greece and Ancient Rome up, and made themselves the inheritors of Western culture, which is the origin of the Renaissance. It was not until 1503, after the election of Pope Julius II, that the Renaissance movement reached its peak, with the emergence of raphael and Michelangelo, who were masters.
After 70 years of captivity in Avignon, Rome's cathedrals were in ruins and decay, and to restore the prestige of the church, they had to be completely renovated. The popes remembered that the indulgences had come, and the Church had made all kinds of counterfeit products to sell, and got some duck blood in a vial, saying that this was the blood of my Lord Christ on the cross; and got some chalk in the bottle, saying that this was the milk of the Virgin Mary. In short, all kinds of trades were vigorously carried out.
The faithful used to confess publicly, so that privacy was gone, so they were willing to confess to the dervishes, and one of the dervish groups was Dominion and the other was Francis, and they went around selling indulgences and listening to the confessions of the believers, and the missionaries said, "Christ is a merchant of heaven, who buys the endless sins and confessions of the world, and sells the resurrection and heaven."
But this gang of dervishes was really ugly, and directly gave birth to the Reformation in 1517, when Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses, he did not think so much, he just wanted to oppose the sale of indulgences, and did not expect to affect the process of human civilization so profoundly.
Traditionally, the theme of altarpieces is the image of the Virgin and Child, but in 1535, Pope Paul III changed the theme to "The Last Judgment", using this horror theme as an altarpiece, forcing worshippers to look at it head-on, which was the first time.
Michelangelo's The Last Judgment
The painting "The Last Judgment" is very large, 16 meters high and 13 meters wide. The kingdom of heaven, Christ and angels, mortals on earth waiting for fate to be decided— the traditional three-tiered structure was dismantled and transformed into a circle centered on Christ and the Virgin Mary. At Christ's feet is St. Lawrence with a grill, he was roasted alive; next to St. Lawrence there is a painting of Bartholomew, and the way he was martyred was to be skinned alive, in short, how frightening it was.
In the next lecture, a good introduction to the Renaissance, this is not clear, we can not understand the Reformation.