wealthy off the fees of litigation and the spoils of the lawsuits. A large admin-
istrative staff sprang up at the papal court, the first bureaucracy to appear in
medieval Europe.
The papacy now had a patronage network extending all over Europe,
outshining that of any secular ruler. The pope began to exert control over the
regional bishops, disputing the appointment power of secular rulers; by the
1300s, the papacy was claiming control over lower clerical appointments as
well. Central authority was enforced by sending papal legates to oversee
matters on the spot. Local episcopal bureaucracies expanded in turn. With its
heavy hand in property holdings and legal transactions, the church became
indispensable to the growing commercial economy. Trained clerics became the
mainstay of secular governments because of their monopoly over literate
administration. The church also moved to take control over armed force.
Militant evangelists as well as popes preached Crusades against infidels on the
Muslim and pagan frontiers, and against heretics within. Combined with the
efforts of the church to enforce domestic peace by ending the fighting among
feudal lords (Bloch, 1961: 412–421), these developments now fostered the
concept of Christendom as an armed state in which the military aristocracy
followed the chain of command from the church. Riding the momentum of its
successful drive for organizational independence from the kings, the papacy at
its height in the mid-1200s went on to claim supremacy in temporal power.^2
The universities resulted from the combined expansion of monasteries and
the papacy (Rashdall, 1936; Cobban, 1975, 1988; Ferruolo, 1985; Stone,
1974a). As competition among the monastic schools increased, the network of
teachers detached itself into specialized organizations in their own right. The
thickest part of the network formed into universities, specializing in theology
and in the subjects that led up to it. The papacy and the universities fed off
each other. As church administration turned bureaucratic, its ranks became
filled by university-trained theologians and canon lawyers. Conversely, the
growing centralization of the church put at its disposal benefices and offices
which were used as patronage for students and graduates of the universities.
There were other roots of university schooling; guilds of the teachers of secular
law and of medicine were also forming, but these soon attached themselves to
the church-sanctioned university structure in order to gain the legal right to
monopolize teaching and grant official degrees.
The universities became the center of intellectual life. The greatest creativity
in abstract ideas took place in subjects preparatory to the advanced degrees,
that is, in logic, philosophy, and natural science, which made up the “under-
graduate” part of the curriculum. As the university elaborated its internal
structure, the autonomous dynamic of the intellectual community was set free
in the sector which was most insulated from outside concerns. Theology stayed458 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths