Excommunication is a temporal or permanent expulsion of a personfrom a religious community as a form of punishment for specific rebel or blasphemous acts. In the context of Christian medieval Europe, excommunication was used as a political tool by the Pope against rebel lords and monarchs.
Interdicts were ecclesial punishment applied by the Church to an entire city, region or province due to rebellions or extended heresies that threated with undermining the power of the Church.
Both interdicts and excommunication were hard punishments that tended to isolate and take power from monarchs that dared to face the Church.
