Your major problem with this question, coming from me as both a financier and amateur economic historian, is that it covers a lot of ground.

Simply put: why did the Church and the nobles of Europe evolve over time to go from land-ownership and income from rent to other forms of income?

The short answer is this: In the beginning, the Church, being from a Jewish background, banned all forms of interest. As a result, the only way to really make capital returns was to own land and collect rent, because capital gains and returns will always outstrip whatever you as a single person could really earn, which is the basic gist of Piketty's Capital (2014). However, in the 1800s, what we saw was that as a result of technological progress and the growing lax prohibitions on interest and interest income from the Church (as a result of many things, including the reformation, the invention and evolution of banking and the capital markets, etc.) as well as the industrialization of all western nations in the 19th Century, land wealth became less and less important, and other forms of capital gains were not only possible but also provided more returns.

Sources:

Piketty, Thomas: Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Wayne A.M. Visser and Alastair McIntosh, A Short Review of the Historical Critique of Usury, available here

Bergstra et al., Interest Prohibition and Financial Product Innovation, available here

Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla, A History of Interest Rates, Wiley (2005)