206 DESTINY DISRUPTED
existence. Politically, the continent fragmented into small realms ruled, es-
sentially, by warlords. In this context, the Church emerged as the single
source of cultural coherence and unity in western Europe, the cultural
medium through which people who spoke different languages and served
different sovereigns could still interact or travel through one another's
realms. To serve this function, the doctrines of the Church had to be uni-
form, universally understood, and universally accepted, so the Church de-
veloped a ferocious propensity for spotting and stamping out heresies.
By the time of the Crusades, church officials in western Europe were
regularly executing heretics-anyone whose publicly stated convictions de-
parted from the prevailing doctrine-by tying them to stakes and lighting
bonfires under them.
As the Church tightened its grip on daily life, the bishop of Rome be-
came the preeminent figure in western Europe. People called him il pape,
the pope, because they considered him the "father" of the Christian com-
munity. In the east, the patriarch of Constantinople was the leading reli-
gious figure, but there were many patriarchs and he was only the first
among equals. In the west, the pope acquired an authority transcending
that of all other bishops. Around the time of the Crusades, Catholics
began to propound the doctrine that the pope was infallible.
Meanwhile, the church was extending its reach across the continent
and down into every cranny. Every rural village, every town, every neigh-
borhood in every city had its parish priest and its local church and every
priest was administering exactly the same rites in the same way and in the
same language. The hierarchy became fully rationalized and embedded:
every priest answered to a higher bishop, every bishop to an archbishop,
archbishops to cardinals, and cardinals to the pope.
But then, as the Crusades died away, this hegemony began to crack.
Here and there, reformers began to question the authority of the church.
In the late fourteenth century, an Oxford professor named John Wycliffe
shocked church officials by translating the Bible into that most vulgar of
languages, common English. And why? So that common, ordinary folks
could read and understand what the Bible said for themselves. Church
officials couldn't fathom why ordinary folks would need to understand
the Bible for themselves when they had priests to do the understanding
for them.