Over against "the world," "the church." . . . As the Reformation was primarily a religious movement, some account of the church in the later Middle Ages must be given. How Christianity was immaculately conceived in the heart of the Galilean carpenter and born with words of beauty and power such as no other man ever spoke; how it inherited from him its background of Jewish monotheism and Hebrew Scripture; how it was enriched, or sophisticated, by Paul, who assimilated it to the current mysteries with their myth of a dying and rising god and of salvation by sacramental rite; how it decked itself in the white robes of Greek philosophy and with many a gewgaw of ceremony and custom snatched from the flamen's vestry; how it created a pantheon of saints to take the place of the old polytheism; how it became first the chaplain and then the heir of the Roman Empire, building its church on the immovable rock of the Eternal City, asserting like her a dominion without bounds of space or time; how it conquered and tamed the barbarians;--all this lies outside the scope of the present work to describe. But of its later fortunes some brief account must be given. [Sidenote: Innocent III 1198-1216] By the year 1200 the popes, having emerged triumphant from their long strife with the German emperors, successfully asserted their claim to the {14} suzerainty of all Western Europe. Innocent III took realms in fief and dictated to kings. The pope, asserting that the spiritual power was as much superior to the civil as the sun was brighter than the moon, acted as the vicegerent of God on earth. But this supremacy did not last long unquestioned. Just a century after Innocent III, Boniface VIII [Sidenote: Boniface VIII 1294-1303] was worsted in a quarrel with Philip IV of France, and his successor, Clement V, a Frenchman, by transferring the papal capital to Avignon, virtually made the supreme pontiffs subordinate to the French government and thus weakened their influence in the rest of Europe. This "Babylonian Captivity" [Sidenote: The Babylonian Captivity 1309-76] was followed by a greater misfortune to the pontificate, the Great Schism, [Sidenote: The Great Schism 1378-1417] for the effort to transfer the papacy back to Rome led to the election of two popes, who, with their successors, respectively ruled and mutually anathematized each other from the two rival cities. The difficulty of deciding which was the true successor of Peter was so great that not only were the kingdoms of Europe divided in their allegiance, but doctors of the church and canonized saints could be found among the supporters of either line. There can be no doubt that respect for the pontificate greatly suffered by the schism, which was in some respects a direct preparation for the greater division brought about by the Protestant secession. [Sidenote: Councils--Pisa, 1409, Constance, 1414-18]