600 years ago the State and the Church throughout Europe was virtually synonymous.
If you say so. I can imagine that things would be a whole lot different (and far better) if your supposition was a fact, rather than a fantasy.
The actual process for heretics was that the Church had an ecclesial trial. If found guilty of heresy, the heretic would be given an opportunity to recant his heresy and to confess. If not, the heretic would be excommunicated. Once excommunicated, the Church has washed her hands of the person unless and until that person repents. Therefore, the Church provides no protection to that person against the state executing its power.
BTW, excommunicated literally means out of communion. It is the most severe penalty that the Church can impose. Essentially, it means that, until the problem that caused the excommunications is cleared, repented of, etc., the Church washes its hands of the individual.
As St. Paul said to Titus:
Tit 3:10-11, After a first and second warning, break off contact with a heretic, realizing that such a person is perverted and sinful and stands self-condemned.
The ultimate goal of breaking contact, or excommunicating, is tough love, as stated in the following:
I Ti 1:19b-20, Some, by rejecting conscience, have made a shipwreck of their faith, among them Hymenaeus 11 and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.
Hopefully that helps your understanding.
Total nonsense. No historian, secular, Marxist, Protestant or Catholic would defend this. The understanding of government was that all power came from an omnipotent God who granted some to the temporal ruler (king, prince, lord) and some to the spiritual ruler (bishop, pope). They were to work together, the secular ruler listening to the admonition of the spiritual ruler about what he should do but in his own name and authority issuing laws and enforcing them to make for a stable and just society in which God could be worshiped and the Church could flourish.
The Church needed the physical protection of the temporal ruler; the temporal ruler needed the spiritual leadership and guidance (pastoring) of the Church if he was to get to heaven. Because the soul is higher than the body and ultimately it's far more important that we get to heaven that that we amass wealth or power on earth, the spiritual authority was higher than the temporal authority but the spiritual authority did not rule the temporal temporally, only spiritually, and vice versa.
Innocent III made high claims for the superiority of the pastoral power of the bishop/pope in the 13th century but he did not claim temporal power or governance--he claimed the ultimate dominance of spiritual authority over the distinct temporal authority--he moved from two swords side-by-side to two swords with one subordinate to the other. Boniface VIII did make claims to a sort of temporal governance as an outgrowth of ultimate spiritual authority along the lines of Innocent in the early 1300s but in part because the growing power of the kings of France was making precisely the opposite overweening claims to control the Church in France. (Innocent made his claims in response to the effort by the German emperor, Frederick II, to totally control the Church.)
This battle the Church lost and probably should never have attempted it, certainly not in the form Boniface took--Innocent's claims are perhaps defensible but still, unwise viewed from hindsight. In the period you are talking about there was, in fact, a growing closeness of state-church rule but only because the state (for the first time we can even begin to talk about a "state" in France or England) was gaining the upper hand against the Church. The reason the conciliar movement at Constance (where Huss was tried under temporal authority--he was summoned to Constance by the emperor and executed under the emperor's authority) and Basel failed because the princes were interfering in the church's business at the council.
But there was no identity of church and state until Zwingli begged the state (city council of Zurich, which governed not just the city but a large block of rural territory) to take over the church. He want to throw off the rule of the bishop, wanted to be freed of having to answer to the bishop of Constance, so he developed the theory that the state should run the Church. That, my friend, is the first true state church and it took place in Reformed Protestant Switzerland.
The same state church model was adopted by Henry VIII in England in the 1530s. Luther too invited the state to take over the church because he believed the bishops were too corrupt to be entrusted with reform. However Luther differed from Zwingli: he thought that once the prince had set up a commission to draft a constitution for the reform of the church in his territory (a Kirchenordnung) then the church should resume self-government. In practice, once invited in, the state never got out of the business of interfering in the church, though in theory the church in Lutheran states had some degree of self-government.
Calvin was the closest to the medieval Catholic approach: both state government and church government should be independent but interrelated--they should work hand-in-glove, each to facilitate the other but without confusing the distinct role of each. In practice, Calvin's attempts to stand up to the city council repeatedly failed so in fact in Geneva the state ran the church more than Calvin wanted it to. In other Calvinist areas, e.g., Massachusetts Bay Colony, an official state church Calvinism grew up, so too in the Netherlands. So although Calvin's theory was much more like medieval Catholic practice, in practice, Calvinists had the state running the church just like Zwingli had done.
So what you asserted was true of late medieval Catholic Europe is untrue of that period and is in fact very true of your own miserable Protestant state church tyranny in the 1500s and following.
And that's what I mean by the falsehoods and distortions of the article HarelyD posted and on which you commented.