ABSTRACT
THE HARVEST FOR the papacy from the formal peace settlement at Venice was not overwhelming, either in Germany where the papal demands for ‘freedom of elections’ remained largely on parchment-the German episcopate appeared to prefer imperial mastery to papal orders-or in Italy where imperial troops were stationed in large parts of the Mathildine territories claimed by the papacy as belonging to the papal state. Yet the effects of the long schism within the papacy and the quarrels between papacy and empire were not lost on contemporaries. These were facts which fanned criticism of the contemporary papacy that was easily to develop into opposition. For what the Western world witnessed in the seventies and eighties of the twelfth century was an upsurge of socalled heretical sects and movements and groups, the common denominator of which was aversion from the officially fixed and applied kind of Christianity. These manifestations grew quite spontaneously in different parts of Europe and were largely independent of each other. This phenomenon furnishes ample evidence of the deep social influence which ecclesiastical institutions had come to exercise, and in particular the papacy which by its thousands of decretals effectively and concretely intervened in the shaping of the social organism. Furthermore, these non-conformist sects flourished strongly where the theocratic or descending theme of government was firmly entrenched and applied in practice, such as in France, Flanders, Southern Germany and the Rhineland. Vice-versa, where this ideology was less developed, the reaction to it was correspondingly weak, which appears to explain the absence of heretical movements on any worthwhile scale in England.
