Catholic Church in the year 700:

Lawrence Krubner has a post up on early medieval marriage. Most of it I quite agree with, but I take some sort of issue with the following paragraph:

"In the late 700s the Catholic Church had suprising little geographic reach. The Moors had taken away Africa, the Middle East, Sicily, the southern toe of Italy, all of Spain and a portion of southern France. The Balkans, Greece, and Asia Minor were in the hands of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Most of Germany and all of Scandanavia was still in purely pagan hands. The Catholic Church had control over Italy north of Naples, Corisca, eastern and northern France, the Rhine vally part of Germany, England and, supposedly, Ireland. I think it's stretch to talk about a Christian Ireland this early. 200 years later Brian Boru was running a country that, from what I've read, was still quite pagan."

This is a time period I've been recently doing some reading on, and I don't really agree with the statement here. First, using the term "Catholic" here is misleading, since there isn't really a clear idea of the Church at this time. Rather, Europe consists of a lot of different groups of Christians with different liturgies and canon laws (not that the use of the term canon law isn't equally problematic here). This is pre- any schism with the eastern Church, and until this time, the Roman Church was probably closer to Constantinople than to Ireland or Spain, at least. There are still Christians in North Africa and Spain, and there are letters from popes to these groups as let as the eleventh century, at least.

While it's true that the Roman Church doesn't have much control (and I would give a slightly different area of effective control, since northern Italy is in the hands of the Lombards at this time, but Rome has some influence in the Balkans), this isn't to say that Christianity isn't established in a larger area. Ireland may have retained some pagan practices, but the country is more than nominally Christian by this time (and Irish missionaries have been establishing monasteries on the Continent and trying to convert pagans for 150 years by now). Spain still contains Christian populations, as does North Africa. It's difficult to refer to the "Eastern Orthodox Church" with the Roman Church still theologically united with the Church at Constantinople and the Roman Church is just emerging from the shadow of the Byzantine Emperor, so one can't really say that Greece, Asia Minor, and particularly the Balkans (which are still basically Latin-speaking at this time) are that divorced from the Roman Church.

It's true that many of these areas don't recognise the supremacy of the Pope at Rome. But that's just a feature of late antiquity rather than a specific sign of the lack of power of Christianity. The fact is that one can't really talk about a Christian Church at this time, but Christianity does have control over a good bit of the world by now, particularly since most "civilised" people would have considered the Mediteranean world to be far more important than that of northern Europe.

I'm not sure how much of this is nit-picking and how much actually changes the argument. I would say that had an ecumenical council made a pronouncement of marriage, this pronouncement could have been implemented over a large area (as evidenced by the enforcement of orthodox Christological ideas). However, the bishop of Rome wouldn't have really had the power at this time to change views on marriage in most of Europe. Heterodoxy in the liturgy and I imagine in marriage practices was allowed at this time, though that doesn't mean that there wasn't some idea of "Christian orthodoxy" in Europe.

I think my point is that it's difficult to claim that some representative of the Church wouldn't have been able to enforce a uniform code of marriage, but rather that the official Church of the late eighth century shied away from such disputes. I don't know why, except to think that maybe it wasn't that important to the emperor, the Frankish king (soon enough to be emperor), or the pope, who were about the only people to call important councils and synods at this time.