administrators outside the church. The loyalty of the clergy is split. National
blocs appear within the church; secular power over clerical appointments
reasserts itself. The election of the pope itself becomes a target for secular
factions. During the Avignon period, the papacy becomes increasingly depend-
ent on the French, its old ally in struggle against the German-based emperor.
Instead of becoming a theocracy of Christendom extending across Europe, the
papacy concentrates its temporal power in its own feudal possessions in central
Italy. By 1400, the pope is largely embroiled in Italian warfare and is reduced
to acting much like another local prince.
- The declining international orientation of the papacy and the shift of
administrative patronage to secular courts, constituting the surrounding con-
ditions for late medieval thinkers. Universities still exist, indeed proliferate with
the rivalry of national and city patrons. But they become bases of factions
rather than points of creative intersection. The scholasticism and philosophical
theology of the university synthesis is put on the defensive by intellectuals who
are now based outside, constituting the lay-oriented movements of mystics and
Humanists. - The breakup of its organizational base, which puts late medieval Chris-
tianity in a decentralized condition somewhat like that of the later period of
Islam. Both religious regions end up with a number of features in common:
the loss of a network center, the decline in creativity, the attack on abstract
ideas, the predominance of mysticism. But the cultural capital each has accu-
mulated is different. One source of the difference is that the Christian intellec-
tual networks develop later, and part of their cultural capital consists in
importing the most sophisticated abstractions accumulated during the thickest
period of the Islamic networks. Christian thinkers are able to use Ibn Sina and
Averroës, late products of the Arab networks that were closing down in their
region of origin. But these could be imported so eagerly—indeed, were delib-
erately sought out—because an initial similarity between the institutions of the
two regions guaranteed that Christendom could import the kinds of ideas with
which it was already familiar. Added to the more “leftward” balance of
factional disputes within Christendom, these imports made for a richer accre-
tion of philosophy by the time their own creative period was over.
The Inner Autonomy of the University
First Thickening of the Networks
Christian philosophy became creative in a movement of wandering dialecti-
cians that rapidly grew up in northern France after 1000.^3 Figure 9.3 shows
the familiar pattern of linkage among the most important intellectual creators,
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^463