Medieval Europe

MEDIEVAL EUROPE

Copyright © 2016 Chris Wickham

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wickham, Chris, 1950– author.

Title: Medieval Europe / Chris Wickham.

Description: New Haven : Yale University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.

LCCN 2016018675 | ISBN 9780300208344 (cloth : alkaline paper)

LCSH: Europe—History—476–1492. | Middle Ages. | Social change—Europe—History—To 1500. | Europe—Social conditions—To 1492. | BISAC: HISTORY / Medieval. | HISTORY / Europe / General. | HISTORY / Social History.

Classification: LCC D117 .W53 2016 | DDC 940.1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018675

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of illustrations and maps

Acknowledgements

1 A new look at the middle ages

2 Rome and its western successors, 500–750

3 Crisis and transformation in the east, 500–850/1000

4 The Carolingian experiment, 750–1000

5 The expansion of Christian Europe, 500–1100

6 Reshaping western Europe, 1000–1150

7 The long economic boom, 950–1300

8 The ambiguities of political reconstruction, 1150–1300

9 1204: the failure of alternatives

10 Defining society: gender and community in late medieval Europe

11 Money, war and death, 1350–1500

12 Rethinking politics, 1350–1500

13 Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations and maps

Illustrations

1Ivory diptych for Manlius Boethius, 487. Museo Civico Cristiano, Brescia, Italy/Bridgeman Images.

2Saint Jean baptistery, Poitiers, sixth century. © Nick Hanna/Alamy Stock Photo.

3Votive crown of Recceswinth, 660s. © Prisma Archivo/Alamy Stock Photo.

4Hagia Sophia, Constantinople (Istanbul), 530s. Photo by Leslie Brubaker.

5Birmingham Qur’an, c. 640s–650s, fols 2r and 1v. University of Birmingham.

6Reception hall, Madinat al-Zahra‘, Córdoba, 950s.

7Palace chapel, Aachen cathedral, c. 800.

8Frankish legal handbook, 850s–870s, Wolfenbüttel Herzog August Bibliothek Cod. Guelf. 299 Gud. lat. © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (http://diglib.hab.de/mss/299-gud-lat/start.htm).

9Lindisfarne Gospels, Gospel of Luke, early eighth century. The British Library (Cotton MS Nero D.IV, f.139).

10Stave church, Heddal, Norway, thirteenth century.

11Bronze doors, Gniezno cathedral, late twelfth century, depicting the death scene of the life of Adalbert of Prague. © Jan Wlodarczyk/Alamy Stock Photo.

12Rocca San Silvestro, Tuscany, thirteenth century. Ventodiluna.

13Apse mosaic of San Clemente, Rome, c. 1118. © imageBROKER/Alamy Stock Photo.

14Pisa cathedral, late eleventh and early twelfth century. M&M Photo.

15Gravensteen castle, Ghent, late twelfth century. © Alpineguide/Alamy Stock Photo.

16The Mercure Shakespeare Hotel, Stratford, thirteenth–sixteenth centuries. © Mark Beton/England/Alamy Stock Photo.

17Notre Dame cathedral, Île de la Cité, Paris. Peter Bull.

18Pipe roll, late twelfth century, 10 Hen II, 1163–64. The National Archives, London.

19Statues of Ekkehard of Meissen and Uta of Ballenstadt, Naumburg cathedral, mid-thirteenth century. © VPC Travel Photo/Alamy Stock Photo.

20The Dream of Innocent III, fresco by Giotto di Bondone, church of San Francesco, Assisi, 1290s. Bridgeman Images.

21Northern (Istanbul) gate, city walls of Nicaea (İznik, Turkey), Roman to early thirteenth century. EBA.

22The Anastasis, Kariye Camii (Chora monastery), Constantinople (Istanbul), c. 1320. QC.

23Rumeli Hisar, Istanbul, 1452. © www.123rf.com/rognar.

24Church of the Intercession on the Nerl, Vladimir, c. 1160. © www.123rf.com/Elena Shchipkova.

25St Anne teaching the Virgin to read, French manuscript illumination, 1430s. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 5, fol. 45v. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

26Effects of good government in the city, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, 1338–39. Fonazione Musei Senesi.

27Egil Skallagrimsson, illustration probably by Hjalti Þorsteinsson from an Icelandic manuscript, seventeenth century, AM 426, f. 2v. Photo by Jóhanna Ólafsdóttir, image courtesy of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies.

28Belfry, Bruges, 1480s. © Jank1000 | Dreamstime.com.

29Charles bridge, Prague, late fourteenth century. Book Travel Prague.

30Patio de las Doncellas, Alcazar, Seville, 1360s. © funkyfood London – Paul Williams/Alamy Stock Photo.

31Enea Silvio Piccolomini sets out for the Council of Basel, by Pinturicchio, Siena cathedral, 1500s. Piccolomini Library, Siena Cathedral, Italy/F. Lensini, Siena/Bridgeman Images.

32Piazza Pio II, Pienza, Tuscany, 1459–62. © Siephoto/Masterfile.

Maps

1Europe in 550.

2Western Europe in 850.

3Eastern Europe in 850.

4Western Europe in 1150.

5Eastern Europe in 1150.

6Western Europe in 1500.

7Eastern Europe in 1500.

Acknowledgements

My first thanks go to Heather McCallum, who suggested that I write this book and finally persuaded me; she also critiqued its drafts and was a reality check throughout. Leslie Brubaker read the whole book and made it clear what changes I could not avoid making; so did two very supportive Yale readers. Many other friends read parts of the book: Pat Geary and Mayke de Jong read Chapters 1 to 6, Lesley Abrams read Chapter 5, Chris Dyer read Chapter 7, John Arnold read Chapter 8, Robert Swanson read Chapter 10, Lyndal Roper read Chapters 10 and 12, John Watts read Chapters 11 and 12. I could not have done this without their (often highly critical) support, especially when I moved into parts of the middle ages I knew relatively little about. Several other people helped me with advice and references and to find books: Peter Coss, Lorena Fierro Díaz, Marek Jankowiak, Tom Lambert, Isabella Lazzarini, Conrad Leyser, Sophie Marnette, Giedre˙ Micku¯naite˙, Maureen Miller, Natalia Nowakowska, Helmut Reimitz, John Sabapathy, Mark Whittow, Emily Winkler, are only some of them. I cannot even list the many people who saved me from errors in casual conversation, not knowing that I was taking mental notes; but all the speakers at the Monday-at-5 medieval seminar which I have run for eleven years at Oxford with Mark Whittow have contributed, in one way or another, to my ideas in this book. I have also to thank RAE2008 and REF2014 for their intellectual stimulus: they forced me to read significant books and articles on a wide variety of topics which I would not always have come across otherwise, and many of these are in the bibliography.

C.W.

January 2016

Map 1 Europe in 550.

Map 2 Western Europe in 850.

Map 3 Eastern Europe in 850.

Map 4 Western Europe in 1150.

Map 5 Eastern Europe in 1150.

Map 6 Western Europe in 1500.

Map 7 Eastern Europe in 1500.

1. Consular diptych for Manlius Boethius, 487. It was very common for late Roman aristocrats to commission commemorative ivory diptychs (pictures in two halves) such as this one, for special occasions – in this case Boethius’ appointment as consul and prefect of Rome. On the right he holds the signal for the start of chariot racing, for these offices involved the patronage of expensive games. The consul was probably the father of the major philosopher, also called Boethius, executed for treason by Theoderic, king of Italy, in 524.

2. The baptistery at Poitiers, sixth century. Very little survives of Merovingian monumental architecture, but this is a good example, in a major city of southern Gaul. All the fabric visible here is original except the modern buttresses, put there to stop it falling down the hill. How much of it dates from the late Roman period, before the Frankish conquest in 507, is a matter of dispute, but the building certainly shows that the Merovingians built – or rebuilt – in a classic Roman style.

3. The votive crown of Recceswinth, 660s. Several crowns given to a church, including those of two Visigothic kings, were found in a treasure hoard in 1858 at Huertas de Guarrazar near Toledo, the Visigothic capital. This one is in gold set with jewels, with the name of the king in pendants hanging below. It is unlikely that it was ever worn. Giving such crowns was a Byzantine practice, imitated by the Visigoths.

4. Hagia Sophia, Constantinople (now Istanbul), 530s. The Great Church of the Byzantine capital was built by the emperor Justinian in 532–37 on a huge scale, larger than any other known roofed building from the Roman empire, and larger than any European successor until Seville cathedral, built between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The roof fell in in 557 and was rebuilt by 562. Only the Ottoman minarets are more recent.

5. The Birmingham Qur’an, c. 640s–650s. The parchment of these pages of the Qur’an, discovered in the University of Birmingham library in 2013, have been carbon-dated to before 645 with 95 per cent accuracy. The text would thus have been written later – normally not all that much later. This date plausibly fits the caliphate of ‘Uthman (644–56), who is credited in Islamic tradition with the compilation of the Muslim holy book in its present form. This plausibility, however, has not prevented arguments about Qur’anic dating from continuing.

6. The reconstructed reception hall of the Umayyad caliphs of Córdoba at Madinat al-Zahra‘, 950s. ‘Abd al-Rahman III built this palace, which was destroyed around 1010; it was excavated in the twentieth century, and reconstructed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its stucco decoration is of very high quality, and we have narrative accounts of how much it impressed envoys from abroad.

7. Charlemagne’s palace chapel at Aachen, interior, c. 800. Charlemagne’s new capital at Aachen had a large chapel attached, which was consecrated by Pope Leo III in 805. It was built to the richest specifications, with marble veneer walling (taken from Rome and Ravenna, according to Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer), bronze work and now-lost frescoes.

8. A Frankish legal handbook from the 850s–870s. This book, surviving in Wolfenbüttel in Germany, is a ninth-century compilation of Frankish law, from the sixth-century Lex Salica (its opening page is pictured) to the capitularies of Charlemagne’s time, up to the 810s. There are dozens of such collections surviving from the period, and they show the importance to Carolingian political leaders of having such handbooks of legal materials.

9. The Lindisfarne gospels, early eighth century. These gospels are among the most sumptuously illustrated of the whole medieval period. They were probably written and illustrated at the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumberland, and are similar to several other gospel books of the same period in England and Ireland, regions which specialised in such decoration. This page opens the Gospel of Luke.

10. The stave church of Heddal, Norway, thirteenth century. Medieval Norway specialised in a highly innovative style for churches made of wood. This, at Heddal in southern Norway, is the largest, although it was enlarged in the 1890s.

11. The bronze doors of Gniezno cathedral, late twelfth century. Poland’s earliest cathedral was rebuilt in the fourteenth century, but these doors survive. They show scenes from the life of the missionary Adalbert of Prague, killed by pagan Prussians in 997, whose body was later bought by the Poles and buried in the cathedral; the scene above the right-hand doorknob shows his death. Their style is that of the German-French borderlands, but the workmen could have come to Poland to make them.

12. Rocca San Silvestro, Tuscany, thirteenth century. Perhaps the best-preserved abandoned medieval village anywhere, Rocca San Silvestro was a silver- and copper-mining village on the Tuscan coast until the metal ran out; its high point, and the date of the present buildings, was the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The castle at the top was the lord’s; the rest was the housing of ordinary villagers, in very good quality stonework. The lord controlled the mining very closely, but the miners seem to have been prosperous too.

13. The apse mosaic of San Clemente, Rome, c. 1118. This spectacular and expensive mosaic, commissioned by a cardinal close to Pope Paschal II, consists of a vine-scroll representing the Christian Church, and is full of images of humans, some of them doing domestic tasks. It shows how the papal leadership wished to display the symbolism of their power and wealth, at a time when they struggled to control Rome itself.

14. Pisa cathedral, late eleventh and early twelfth century. This building is the most innovative Italian church of its time, and clearly shows the ambition of the Pisans. Much of the cost of the building was paid for from booty taken from naval attacks on rich Muslim cities, some of which are commemorated in inscriptions on its façade.

15. The castle of Ghent, late twelfth century. The core of the castle of the counts of Flanders at Ghent (including the gateway on the right) is original, although the building was substantially rebuilt in the nineteenth century. It was one of the major centres of the power of the counts, inside what became the largest town in Flanders. Ghent’s success as a manufacturing centre started with the castle, but the town became the count’s most serious opponent as it became larger and richer.

16. The Shakespeare Hotel, Stratford-upon-Avon, thirteenth–sixteenth centuries. The plot that the hotel sits on is one of the original plots laid out at the foundation of Stratford around 1200, still visible in the town plan. The building itself, in classic English urban half-timbering, dates to the Tudor period, and has been restored since.

17. Notre Dame cathedral, Paris. This church is the best-known of the wave of large and expensive gothic churches built in northern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – in this case in the 1160s–1260s. The spire is nineteenth-century.

18. A pipe roll, late twelfth century. The English Exchequer (finance department) pioneered systematic copies of government administrative acts; they survive from 1130, and in a near-complete sequence from 1156. Their name comes from the tube shape when the parchments (in sets sewn together) were rolled up.

19. Statues of Ekkehard of Meissen and Uta of Ballenstedt, Naumburg, mid-thirteenth century. These statues are of eleventh-century founders of Naumburg cathedral in north-east Germany, put up two centuries later as part of a group of twelve very high-quality sculptures. They well show the attachment of church communities to lay patrons, which was a feature of every medieval century.

20. The Dream of Innocent III, Assisi, 1290s. This fresco in San Francesco, the first great Franciscan church, plausibly ascribed to Giotto and his school, depicts Innocent dreaming that Francis of Assisi was holding up the Lateran basilica (the cathedral of Rome) on his own. This was part of the early myth-making around Francis and his remarkable political success.

21. The northern (Istanbul) gate of Nicaea, Roman to early thirteenth century. These monumental walls and gate have a Roman base, but were systematically repaired and rebuilt in the Byzantine period, in particular under the emperors of Nicaea (1204–61).

22. The Anastasis, Kariye Camii, Istanbul, c. 1320. The Chora (Kariye) monastery was built by the senior Constantinople administrator and intellectual Theodore Metochites in 1315–21. This is its most dramatic fresco, of Christ harrowing hell – here he is lifting up Adam and Eve, to take them to heaven.

23. Rumeli Hisar, Istanbul, 1452. This castle was built in preparation for Mehmet II’s siege of Constantinople, to block food supplies coming down the Bosporos in Venetian ships to the city.

24. The church of the Intercession on the Nerl, Vladimir, c. 1160. This is a particularly attractive example of the way Russian rulers adopted and adapted Byzantine styles to produce an architecture all their own. It was built outside the town of Vladimir by Prince Andrey Bogolyubskiy (1157–74).

25. St Anne teaching her daughter the Virgin Mary to read, French manuscript, 1430s. This was a common scene in late-medieval illuminated manuscript books, and is a marker of a widespread assumption in the period both that some laywomen could be literate and that, when they were, it was they who taught reading to their children.

26. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effects of good government in the city, Siena, 1338–39. This fresco, appropriately located in Siena’s city hall, shows an idealised image of how a well-governed town should look, with a shoe shop, teaching, much movement of goods and (less plausibly) women dancing in the street.

27. Egil Skallagrimsson, Icelandic manuscript, seventeenth century. Egil, a late-tenth-century Icelandic poet of high quality (we have some of his poems), was also a violent and sarcastic troublemaker with a very large skull. This early modern image shows what Icelanders of the time thought a peasant hero should look like.

28. The belfry, Bruges, 1480s. This phallic image of civic pride, topping the covered market in Bruges’ main market square, was begun in the thirteenth century in wood, with the octagon at the top being added at the end of the fifteenth.

29. Charles bridge, Prague, late fourteenth century. This bridge, for long the only one over the river Vltava which divides Prague, was rebuilt on a massive scale by the sculptor and architect Peter Parler for the emperor Charles IV. The Old Town bridge tower in the picture is his too, and is a good example of Bohemian secular gothic. The swans are recent.

30. Patio de las Doncellas, Alcazar, Seville, 1360s. After the Castilian conquest of most of al-Andalus, many Muslim Spanish artistic traditions (most visible in the Alhambra in Granada) were taken into the rest of Spain. The Alcazar (the royal palace) of Seville is a particularly good example, using Muslim styles very extensively, mixing them with Christian ones.

31. Enea Silvio Piccolomini sets out for the Council of Basel, 1500s. This is at once a classic ‘Renaissance’ seascape and a scene in the life of a Senese intellectual who became Pope Pius II (1458–64). The frescoes of Pius’s life, by Pinturicchio, were commissioned by a nephew of Enea Silvio who also became pope briefly, as Pius III, in 1503. Enea Silvio made his name at the Council of Basel, which explains the choice of this scene, even if it recalls a defiantly non-papal council.

32. The main square of Pienza, Tuscany, 1459–62. Pius II was born in Corsignano, a small village in southern Tuscany. As pope, he made it a city and renamed it after himself, as Pienza, and had it decorated with large-scale and state-of-the-art ‘Renaissance’ buildings, as would befit a far larger city – the open countryside can here be seen behind the cathedral.

CHAPTER ONE

A new look at the middle ages

This book is about change. What we call the medieval period, or the middle ages, lasted a thousand years, from 500 to 1500; and Europe, which is the subject of this book, was a very different place at the end of this period from what it had been at the beginning. The Roman empire dominated the start of the period, unifying half of Europe but dividing it sharply from the other half; a millennium later, Europe had taken the complicated shape it has kept since, with a majority of the independent states of the present recognisable in some form or other. My aim in the book is to show how this change, and many others, happened, and how far they are important. But it is not focused on outcomes. Many writers about the middle ages have been preoccupied with the origins of those ‘nation’-states, or with other aspects of what they see as ‘modernity’, and for them it is these outcomes which give meaning to the period. This for me is seriously mistaken. History is not teleological: that is to say, historical development does not go to; it goes from. Furthermore, as far as I am concerned, the medieval period, full of energy as it was, is interesting in and for itself; it does not need to be validated by any subsequent developments. I hope that this book will make that interest clear.

This does not, however, mean that medieval European history simply consisted of swirling patterns of events, which had no structure at all except as part of some randomly selected millennium. Far from it. The middle ages had some clearly marked moments of change; it is these which give form to the period. The fall of the Roman empire in the west in the fifth century, the crisis of the eastern empire when it confronted the rise of Islam in the seventh, the forcefulness of the Carolingian experiment in very large-scale moralised government in the late eighth and ninth, the expansion of Christianity in northern and eastern Europe in (especially) the tenth, the radical decentralisation of political power in the west in the eleventh, the demographic and economic expansion of the tenth to thirteenth, the reconstruction of political and religious power in the west in the twelfth and thirteenth, the eclipse of Byzantium in the same period, the Black Death and the development of state structures in the fourteenth, and the emergence of a wider popular engagement with the public sphere in the late fourteenth and fifteenth: these are in my view those major moments of change, and they have a chapter each in this book. Linking all of these turning points was a set of structural developments: among others, the retreat and reinvention of concepts of public power, the shift in the balance of the resources of political systems from taxation to landowning and back again, the changing impact of the use of writing on political culture, and the growth in the second half of the middle ages of formalised and bounded patterns of local power and identity, which transformed the ways rulers and the people they ruled dealt with each other. These will be at the centre of this book too. A book of this length cannot delve into the microhistory of societies or cultures in any detail, nor, for that matter, provide detailed country-by-country narratives of events. This is an interpretation of the middle ages, not a textbook account – there are anyway many of the latter, many of them excellent, and they do not need to be added to.¹ I have, certainly, in every chapter set out brief accounts of political action, so as to give contexts to my arguments, especially for readers who are coming to the medieval period for the first time. But my intention is to concentrate on the moments of change and the overarching structures, to show what, in my view, most characterised the medieval period and makes it interesting; and they are the basic underpinnings of what follows.

My list of moments of change also presents a different storyline from that which appears, whether explicitly or implicitly, in all too many other accounts of the European middle ages. A very common narrative, even today, sees Europe emerging from degradation with the eleventh-century ‘Gregorian reform’, from ignorance with the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’, from poverty with Flemish cloth-making and Venetian shipping, from political weakness with the (nation-)state-building of Henry II and Edward I in England, Philip II and Louis IX in France, Alfonso VI and Ferdinand III in Castile, to reach its apex in the ‘high medieval’ twelfth and thirteenth centuries with crusades, chivalry, gothic cathedrals, papal monarchy, the university of Paris and the Champagne fairs; by contrast, the post-1350 period sees a ‘waning’, with plague, war, schism and cultural insecurity, until humanism and radical church reform sort matters out again. That narrative will not be found in this book. It misrepresents the late middle ages, and excludes the early middle ages and Byzantium entirely; furthermore, far too much of it is a product of that desire to make the medieval period, at least after 1050, ‘really’ part of modernity, which I have already criticised. It is also the hidden heir of the old desire for history to provide moral lessons, periods to admire, heroes and villains, which historians say they have got beyond but often have not.

That moralism, for many, derives from the word ‘medieval’ itself. The word has a curious history; it was a negative word from the start, and has often remained one. From the Roman republic onwards, people regularly referred to themselves as ‘modern’ – moderni in Latin – and to forebears as antiqui, ‘ancient’. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, a handful of intellectuals, whom we call humanists, began to restrict the word ‘ancient’ to the classical writers of the Roman empire and its predecessors, whom they saw as their true forebears, with the supposedly inferior writers of the intervening millennium relegated to what was increasingly, by the seventeenth century, called the ‘middle age’, the medium aevum, hence ‘medieval’. This usage was picked up above all in the nineteenth century, and it then spread to everything else: ‘medieval’ government, the economy, the church, and so on, to be set against the concept, also nineteenth-century, of the Renaissance, when ‘modern’ history supposedly started.² The medieval period could thus be seen as a random invention, a confidence trick perpetrated on the future by a few scholars. But it has become a powerful image, as more and more layers of ‘modernity’ have built up.

Once history-writing became more professionalised, from the 1880s onwards, and period specialisms developed, the medieval past began to gain a more positive image too. Some of it was somewhat defensive, as for example in the claims of scholars of different medieval centuries for ‘renaissances’ of their own, which might legitimate their period in the eyes of contemptuous moderns, the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’ again, or the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’. Some of it was very enthusiastic and sometimes fervent, as Catholic historians extolled the religious purity of the middle ages, or nationalist historians focused on the always-medieval roots of the always-superior identity of their own countries. The medieval period, a long time ago and in some places poorly documented, becomes here the imagined origin of any number of twentieth-century desires, and as fictional as the rhetoric of any humanist. But there was also a century and more of hard empirical work, which has allowed the complexity and fascination of the medieval millennium to be recognised, more and more clearly. Medieval historians often owe more to the preoccupations of nationalist historiography than they realise; it is still true that English historians are more prone to see the growth of the English state as a central theme – the first nation-state in Europe, a mark of English exceptionalism – and the Germans worry at the Sonderweg, the ‘special path’ that prevented such a state forming in their country; whereas Italian historians regard the break-up of the kingdom of Italy with equanimity, because it meant autonomy for Italy’s cities, and thus the civic culture which brought with it the (to them very Italian) Renaissance.³ But the depth and complexity of medieval scholarship by now is sufficiently great that there are also alternatives to these views, and we can get around them more easily.

That solves one problem, then; but another appears. If we no longer imagine the middle ages to be a long dark period of random violence, ignorance and superstition, then what differentiates this time from before and after? The start of the period is to an extent easier, because it is conventionally attached to the political crises which came with the fall of the western Roman empire in the fifth century, hence the rough date of 500 for the ancient–medieval divide: whether or not one sees the Roman empire as somehow ‘better’ than the western successor states, the latter were certainly more fragmented, structurally weaker, economically simpler. The break is complicated by the long survival of the eastern Roman empire, which we now call Byzantium; as a result, in south-eastern Europe 500 is no dividing line at all. Indeed, the break even in the west only affected a handful of today’s European nations, France, Spain, Italy and southern Britain being the largest, for the Roman empire never extended to Ireland, Scandinavia, most of Germany or most of the Slavic-speaking countries. It is also complicated by the success of the last generation of historians in showing that there were strong continuities across the divide at 500, in cultural practices in particular – religious assumptions, the imagery of public power – which might make a ‘late late antiquity’ survive for a long time, for some to 800, for some to the eleventh century. Here the relationship between change and stability nuances the sharpness of the break when the empire broke up. But the half century either side of 500 still remains a convenient starting point, and, for me at least, a marker of strong change at too many levels to ignore.

The year 1500 (or, again, the half-century either side of it) is harder: less changed then, or, at least, the supposed markers of the beginning of the ‘modern’ period were not all particularly significant. The final fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 was not so world-shattering, for that once-large empire was by now reduced to small scattered provinces in what is now Greece and Turkey, and anyway the Ottomans carried on Byzantine political structures pretty effectively. The ‘discovery’ of America by Columbus – or, better, the conquest of its major states by Spanish adventurers in the 1520s and 1530s – was certainly catastrophic for Americans, but its effect on Europe (outside Spain) took a long time to become substantial. The humanist movement that lies at the intellectual core of the Renaissance seems increasingly medieval in style. We are left with the Protestant Reformation, again above all in the 1520s–1530s (with a Catholic Counter-Reformation later in the century), as a religious and cultural shift which split western and central Europe into two and created two often opposing blocks, each with steadily diverging political and cultural practices, which still exist. That certainly was a major, and relatively sudden, break, even if it had little effect on the Orthodox Christianity of eastern Europe. If we regard the Reformation as the marker of the end of medieval Europe, however, then we start the middle ages with a political and economic crisis in an environment of cultural and religious continuities, and we end it with a cultural and religious crisis in an environment in which politics and economics remained much the same. There is an artificiality here, in the whole definition of the middle ages, which we cannot get away from.

This recognition, however, allows us to look again at the issue of how to deal with the middle ages as a single bounded unit. It would of course be possible to look for a better date than 1500 to end a study: maybe 1700, with scientific and financial revolutions; maybe 1800, with political and industrial revolutions. These dates have been canvassed plenty of times before. But that would be to make claims that one sort of change was paramount, at the expense of others; it would be to invent new boundaries, not to relativise them. The attraction of sticking to what we have is precisely that 500–1500 is an artificial span of time, in which changes can be tracked in different ways in different places, without them having to lead teleologically to some major event at the end, whether Reformation, revolution, industrialisation, or any other sign of ‘modernity’. And it must also be added, although I do not attempt the task here, that this can help wider comparison as well. Historians of Africa or India or China in our present millennium often criticise the ‘medieval’ label, because it seems to carry European baggage, and, most seriously, to assume a teleology of inevitable European supremacy, of a type which most historians now reject. But if its artificiality is recognised, the medieval European experience can be used comparatively, to be set against other experiences in a more neutral and thus useful way.⁴

Actually, ‘Europe’ is not a straightforward concept either. It is simply a peninsula of the Eurasian landmass, as Southeast Asia is.⁵ To the north-east, it is separated from the great Asian states by the forests of Russia and the emptiness of Siberia, but the steppe corridor south of that linked Asia and Europe for active horsemen in all periods, as the Huns, Bulgar Turks and Mongols showed in turn, and the steppe continued westwards from Ukraine into Hungary in the heart of Europe. And, most important, southern Europe is inseparable from the Mediterranean, and from economic connections, even when not political and cultural links, to the neighbouring regions of west Asia and north Africa in all periods. While the Roman empire lasted, the Mediterranean as a united sea was far more important as an object of study than was ‘Europe’, split as the latter was between the Roman state to the south and an ever-changing network of ‘barbarian’ peoples (as the Romans called them) to the north. This did not alter soon; the Christian religion and the technologies of post-Roman government hardly extended north of the old Roman frontier until after 950. By then, the Mediterranean was anyway beginning to revive as a trade hub, and was as important as northern exchange networks for the rest of the middle ages.⁶ And Europe was never a single political unit, and never has been since.

People did talk about Europe in the middle ages, certainly. The entourage of the Carolingians in the ninth century, the kings who ruled what is now France, Germany, the Low Countries and Italy, sometimes called their patrons lords of ‘Europe’, and so did their successors in the Ottonian Germany of the tenth century: they were posing their patrons as potential overlords of fairly vaguely characterised but wide lands, and ‘Europe’ was a good word for that. It survived throughout the middle ages in this rhetorical sense, alongside a basic geographical framing taken from antiquity, but it seldom – not never, but seldom – acted as the basis for any claimed identity.⁷ It is true that, steadily across the central middle ages, Christianity did spread to all of what are now called the European lands (Lithuania, then much larger than its present size, was the last polity whose rulers converted, in the late fourteenth century). This did not create a common European religious culture, however, for the northward expansions of Latin-based and Greek-based Christianities were two separate processes. Furthermore, the ever-changing border between Christian- and Muslim-ruled lands – with Christian rulers pushing south in thirteenth-century Spain, and Muslim rulers (the Ottomans) pushing north into the Balkans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – meant that the neatness of a ‘Christian Europe’ (which anyway always excludes Europe’s numerous Jews) never matched reality, as it still does not. In a very general sense, as we shall see, the second half of our period does see Europe gaining some level of common development inside the framework of a variety of institutions and political practices, such as the network of bishoprics, or the use of writing in government, which linked Russia across to Portugal. This is not enough for us to see the continent as a single whole, all the same. It was too diverse. All claims to an essential European, and only European, unity are fictional even today, and in the middle ages they would have been fantastic. So: medieval Europe is simply a large differentiated space, seen across a long time period. It is also well enough documented to allow some quite nuanced study. This is not a romantic image at all, and is intended not to be. But this space and time holds some enthralling material all the same. It is my aim to give it shape.

A final warning here. There are two common approaches to the medieval centuries: to make medieval people ‘just like us’, only operating in a technologically simpler world of swords and horses and parchment and no central heating; and to make them immeasurably different from us, with value systems and categorisations of the world which are hard to grasp at all, which are often unpleasant to us, and which involve complex reconstruction to create a logic and a justification for them in their own terms. Each of these is in some ways accurate, but both, taken on their own, are traps. The first approach risks banality, or else the moralisation which results from disappointment, when medieval actors apparently fail to grasp what to us would have been obvious. The second risks moralisation too, but its alternative is too often collusion, even cuteness, with the historian-as-anthropologist focusing only on the fascination of the strange, sometimes on a very small scale indeed. I would rather try to embrace them both, in a wider historicising attempt to see how medieval people made choices in the political and economic environments they really had, and with the values they really possessed, making ‘their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted’.⁸ Marx, whose words these are, did not think that such an analysis involved collusion, and nor do I; but it does require understanding, of the various actors in a very different but not unrecognisable world. As all history requires; although it is indeed important to recognise that the 980s were genuinely strange, with values and a political logic which we have to make an imaginative effort to reconstruct, it is equally important to remember that the same is true of the 1980s.

*  *  *

In the rest of this introductory chapter, I want to set out some basic parameters for how medieval society worked, which will themselves help to make sense of the different patterns of behaviour and political directions which we will see in the rest of this book. In this first section I will discuss politics, particularly in the central medieval period; then I will move on, more briefly, to the economy and to some basic aspects of medieval culture. Not that all medieval people thought and acted the same; as usual, divergences were huge; but there were some features common to a substantial proportion of them, some of which were simply consequences of basic socioeconomic patterns common to the whole period, as we shall see.

Medieval Europe was not easy to get about in. It had a network of roads inherited from the Roman empire, but these did not extend past the Roman frontier, along the Rhine and Danube; the road system in the rest of Germany and, still more, further north and east, was rudimentary for a long time, and travellers kept to water transport and river valleys as much as they could. In a world without maps, only experts could take any route-finding risks. Europe is not a continent of high mountains, apart from the Alps; what was more of a barrier was the forest cover of most of continental Europe, except Britain and some of the Mediterranean lands – some 50 per cent in what is now Germany, some 30 per cent in what is now France, more in eastern Europe. The stories of bold young tailors getting lost in the forests of the Brothers Grimm were not fantasy, at least in that respect. In 1073, the German emperor Henry IV, retreating fast from the start of the great Saxon revolt, had to take to the forest, for the Saxons were guarding the roads, and travel for three days without food before he arrived in settled lands again. And travel was anyway slow, even by road. When the same Henry, by now victorious against the Saxons, had a political showdown with Pope Gregory VII in 1075–76, the threatening messages between them, which built up quickly to mutual threats of deposition, took nearly a month to travel each way between southern Saxony and then Utrecht in the modern Netherlands, where Henry was, and Rome – and that was with fast riders, the fastest means of communication until the railways of the nineteenth century.⁹ Landscape was a danger and an inconvenience; the romance and beauty of mountain ranges were seen by almost no-one – they were, rather more, the haunt of demons and (in Scandinavia) trolls.

This wildness should not be exaggerated, however. It was there as a backdrop, and sometimes forced itself into the foreground; but it did not stop some European polities from being often quite large, and stably so. The Carolingian empire, as we have already seen, stretched across over half of western Europe; the power of the princes of Kiev in the eleventh century stretched nearly as far, in what is now Russia and Ukraine, a land where, north of the open steppe, forest cover was virtually complete. People did get about. Kings were often on the move for their entire reigns – King John of England (1199–1216)* travelled an average of 20km a day, seldom staying anywhere more than a few nights.¹⁰ Large armies regularly moved a thousand kilometres and more, as for example with the campaigns of German emperors in Italy in the tenth to thirteenth centuries, or the land marches and sea voyages of crusaders, intent on attacking Palestine or Egypt, which were, whatever else they achieved, at least logistical triumphs. More slowly, substantial populations could move, as with the German migration into large sections of eastern Europe after 1150. So: it must, certainly, be recognised that the European world was in general very localised. Most people did indeed only know the land for a few villages in any direction, usually as far as the nearest markets. A count, i.e. the king’s local representative, on the edge of a kingdom could often do pretty much what he liked for some time, without the king being able to stop him or, sometimes, even knowing what he was up to. The difficulties of communication always got in the way. But kings, if they were effective, did turn up in the end with armed men (or send other counts to take over), and counts knew they would: that curtailed at least open disloyalty. And there were other techniques of government that could extend the powers of rulers quite far, and quite solidly. We will look at them in future chapters. Here, however, let us look at some of the basic procedures of political power that operated across much of our period. I will focus on a single instance, and then discuss its implications.

In the summer of 1159, Henry II, king of England (1154–89), laid claim to the southern French county of Toulouse. Henry already held nearly half of France, duchies and counties from Normandy in the north to the Pyrenees in the south, by inheritance from both his parents and through his wife Eleanor, herself heiress to the large southern duchy of Aquitaine; Toulouse was, it could be argued, Eleanor’s inheritance too, if Henry could get its count to give in. All these French lands he held from the French king, Louis VII (1137–80), to whom he had done homage and sworn fidelity, promising to defend Louis’s life and person, as recently as 1158; but Louis, who directly controlled only the Paris region, had no prospect of matching Henry’s military power. Henry invaded Toulouse that summer with a huge army, probably the largest he ever called together, including most of the major barons from his English and French domains, and even the king of Scotland, Malcolm IV, who had done homage to him. Louis could not allow Henry to expand his authority even further, and anyway Count Raymond V of Toulouse was his brother-in-law, so he had to try and help him, but what could he do? What Louis did was ride to Toulouse with quite a small entourage (and therefore fast), so that, when Henry arrived there with his army, the king of France was already in the city, organising its defence. Henry could probably have taken Toulouse, notwithstanding its strong fortifications – that was clearly his plan, at least – but his sworn lord was by now inside the walls. As one contemporary source said, ‘he did not wish to besiege the town of Toulouse, in honour of King Louis of the French, who defended the same town against King Henry’; as another (who thought he was wrong) said, he took advice not to attack out of ‘empty superstition and reverence’. That is to say, Henry was stuck. If he attacked his lord whom he had sworn to defend, what value were his barons’ own oaths to him? And what would he do with a captured king who was his lord? So he did not attack, and after a summer of ravaging simply retreated. Henry, one of the two most powerful monarchs in western Europe, could not risk being seen as an oath-breaker, and preferred to lose prestige – a lot of prestige – as a failed strategist instead.¹¹

The personal relationship between Henry and Louis was what mattered here. It was hedged about with ceremonial – oaths, homage (the formal recognition of personal dependence), and so on; and it was tied very closely to honour. It was also tied to assumptions about lordship: this ceremonial was part of the terms by which Henry, as a lord, held his dozen counties and duchies, with their landed resources, from the king of France, in contrast to his richest and most coherent territory, England itself, where he was fully sovereign. Here we are in the middle of the world of what is often called military feudalism: a wide élite of great aristocrats and knights did military service, and showed political loyalty, in return for gifts of office or land from kings or lesser lords, which they would lose if they were disloyal. Such men would often be called the lord’s sworn vassi, vassals, and the conditional landholdings would be called feoda, fiefs, hence the words ‘feudal’ and ‘feudo-vassalic’ in modern historical terminology. Henry’s French lands are often called feoda in contemporary sources; Henry’s barons, too, above all came to Toulouse as Henry’s sworn men and recipients of lands. As