During the High Middle Ages (1050-1300), the Latin Christendom reached its cultural height.  This chapter examines the social, political, economic, and intellectual developments that gave rise to and defined this civilization.

After 1050, Europe experienced renewed prosperity and social change.  Agricultural improvements prompted a population increase that, in turn, enabled the clearing and cultivation of unused land.  Italian city-states cleared Mediterranean sea-lanes, allowing long-distance trade to thrive, and towns grew into vital social, political, and economic units.  Although feudal lords benefited from the improved agriculture, the towns challenged their traditional authority. Asserting the rights of their communities, the rising middle-class burghers obtained special charters from lords.  Further, the towns loosened the feudal hierarchy by offering refuge to serfs and assuming control of their own financial and legal affairs.  Guilds further strengthened the towns by regulating trade and setting rules of labor.

Another challenge to the feudal order came from the rising national monarchies.  After the Norman Conquest, England achieved considerable unity through the common law system built by Henry I and Henry II.  The Magna Carta planted the seed of representative government from which the houses of Lords and Commons eventually grew.  France under the Capetians and Germany under Otto the Great and his successors also took steps toward unity, but neither reached the level of statehood achieved by England.  In France, local loyalties remained strong, and the German emperors undermined their own power through their struggles with the papacy for control of Italy.

The church also expanded its authority, asserting it in both secular and spiritual affairs.  As the one universal institution and indispensable intermediary between God and humanity, the church used the sacraments as carrot and stick to dominate Europe. Eleventh-century monastic reform, led by the Cluniac Benedictines, encouraged the papacy to built its own power.  Under Gregory VII, the papacy claimed preeminence over the church hierarchy and secular rulers.  Opposition from the German emperors occasioned the Investiture Controversy that lasted until the Concordat of Worms divided authority over bishops between the papacy and the emperor.  However, conflict between the popes and emperors continued, only temporarily interrupted by the crusades.  Through that series of destructive military expeditions, the papacy tried to direct the energy of Europe's quarrelsome nobility into the task of taking the Holy Land from the Muslims and holding it for the church.  The church also dealt with dissenters and reformers at home.  The Waldensians and Cathari—sects that denounced the church's wealth and moral laxity—were branded heretics and cruelly persecuted, while the Franciscan and Dominican friars—orders that preached moral purity—were channeled into service of the church.  Papal power reached its height under Innocent the III, who advanced the idea of papal monarchy subordinate to God alone.  Under his leadership, the Fourth Lateran Council asserted several papal claims, including Roman Catholic dominion over the Eastern Orthodox church and authority to nullify laws detrimental to the church.

The growth of church power fueled widespread persecution of Jews.  A variety of popular myths made medieval Christians predisposed to attacking Jews.  Although the church denounced these myths, it argued that Jews should be humiliated for resisting Christianity, and the Fourth Lateran Council ordered several stigmatizing injunctions against them.  Nevertheless, Jewish culture flourished during this period, led by scholars such as Maimonides, whose diverse works sought to harmonize Jewish religious thought and Greek rational philosophy.

In the newly stable and prosperous Europe, Christian culture enjoyed a great intellectual flowering as well.  Fueled by the administrative needs of the rising towns and through contact with Byzantine and Islamic scholarship, the Twelfth Century Awakening saw a revival of classical learning.  The centers of this learning were the universities that grew in the towns from loose affiliations of teachers and students to formal institutions organized much like guilds.  Teaching subjects ranging from grammar and logic to law, medicine, and theology, the universities relied on Latin translations of classical works, including Aristotle.  The recovery of Aristotle energized the development of scholasticism, through which philosophers strove to unify faith and reason.  The most prominent of these include Anselm, who developed a rational proof of God's existence; Peter Abelard, who imposed rigorous dialectical logic to theological issues; and Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica achieved a graceful synthesis of Christian belief and Aristotelian reason.  The strict Aristotelians of Paris opposed Aquinas' Christianization of Aristotle, and their effort to uphold the integrity of reason as a tool of philosophy led the church to support conservative theologians by condemning many theological propositions that bore the stamp of Aristotelian naturalism.

In addition to philosophy, high-medieval thinkers achieved notable results in other disciplines.  Opposing the Augustinian view of history, Joachim of Fiore developed a teleology in which history passed through three stages and culminated with the age of Revelation.  Thinkers including Albert the Great, Robert Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon made scientific advances in areas ranging from botany and zoology to mathematics and optics.  With the help of translations of Islamic texts, European physicians absorbed Hippocrates and Galen, advancing medical knowledge through dissection of animals and study of medicinal plants.  Medieval thinkers including Jean Buridan also created an anti-Aristotelian physics that pointed toward the modern theory of inertia.  Medieval jurists led by Irnerius of Bologna studied the Byzantine Corpus Juris Civilis, thus reviving Roman legal universalism and introducing it into European canon and secular law.

The High Middle Ages marked the maturity of a distinct world view.  To the medieval mind, all good descended from God. The universe was structured both geocentrically and hierarchically with Heaven at the top, Hell at the bottom, and humanity in between above lower animals.  Individuals were tainted by Original Sin but redeemable through the mediation of the church and its sacraments.  All human activity was rightly aimed at achieving salvation.  Even the most Aristotelian of the scholastics accepted that worldly knowledge was subordinate to revealed truth, reason to faith, and that God granted people intelligence so that they could choose freely to obey him.