ABSTRACT
During the Medieval period, the three major forces shaping European society were the Catholic Church, the nobility, and the craft guilds. A major contributor to change, progress, and to the development of the middle class was the Crusades, initially mounted by Pope Urban II for three reasons. The first was to stop fighting among Europe’s lords by giving them a common objective, a common enemy. The second was to unite the European and Western Catholic Churches under papal leadership. The third was to reclaim the Holy Lands, specifically Jerusalem, from the Moslems. Although idealistic values, defined by scholars and other thinkers as well as by the Church, continued to play a major role in shaping the reality of life at this point in history, a split between desire and reality, between ideals and pragmatism, started to occur. The Renaissance was shaped by several key influences. The most important of these was the steadily increasing power of the merchant class.
