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9 Christian Europe
Emerges, 6001200

CHAPTER OUTLINE
The Byzantine Empire, 6001200 Early Medieval Europe, 6001000 The Western Church Kievan Russia, 9001200 Western Europe Revives, 10001200 The Crusades, 10951204 DIVERSITY AND DOMINANCE: Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg and the Christianization of the Scandinavians and Slavs ENVIRONMENT AND TECHNOLOGY: Cathedral Organs

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hristmas Day in 800 found Charles, king of the Franks, in Rome instead of at his palace at Aachen in northwestern Germany. At six-foot-three, Charles towered over the average man of his time, and his royal career had been equally gargantuan. Crowned king in his mid-twenties in 768, he had crisscrossed Europe for three decades, waging war on Muslim invaders from Spain, Avar invaders from Hungary, and a number of German princes. Charles had subdued many enemies and had become protector of the papacy. So not all historians believe the eyewitness report of his secretary and biographer that Charles was surprised when, as the king rose from his prayers, Pope Leo III placed a new crown on his head. Life and victory to Charles the August, crowned by God the great and pacic Emperor of the Romans, proclaimed the pope.1 Then, amid the cheers of the crowd, he humbly knelt before the new emperor. Charlemagne (from Latin Carolus magnus, Charles the Great) was the rst in western Europe to bear the title emperor in over three hundred years. Romes decline and Charlemagnes rise marked a shift of focus for Europeaway from the Mediterranean and toward the north and west. German custom and Christian piety transformed the Roman heritage to create a new civilization. Irish monks preaching in Latin became important intellectual inuences in some parts of Europe, while the memory of Greek and Roman philosophy faded. Urban life continued the decline that had begun in the later days of the Roman Empire. Historians originally called this era medieval, literally middle age, because it comes between the era of Greco-Roman civilization and the intellectual, artistic, and economic changes of the Renaissance in the fourteenth century; but research has uncovered many aspects of medieval culture that are as rich and creative as those that came earlier and later. Charlemagne was not the only ruler in Europe to claim the title emperor. Another emperor held sway in the Greek-speaking east, where Romes political and legal heritage continued. The Eastern Roman Empire
Avar (ah-vahr) Charlemagne (SHAHR-leh-mane)

was often called the Byzantine Empire after the seventh century, and was known to the Muslims as Rum. Western Europeans lived amid the ruins of empire, while the Byzantines maintained and reinterpreted Roman traditions. The authority of the Byzantine emperors blended with the inuence of the Christian church to form a cultural synthesis that helped shape the emerging kingdom of Kievan Russia. Byzantiums centuries-long conict with Islam helped spur the crusading passion that overtook western Europe in the eleventh century. The comparison between western and eastern Europe appears paradoxical. Byzantium inherited a robust and self-condent late Roman society and economy, while western Europe could not achieve political unity and suffered severe economic decline. Yet by 1200 western Europe was showing renewed vitality and exing its military muscles, while Byzantium was showing signs of decline and military weakness. As we explore the causes and consequences of these different historical paths, we must remember that the emergence of Christian Europe included both developments. As you read this chapter, ask yourself the following questions:

What role did Christianity play in reshaping European society in east and west? How did the Roman heritage differently affect the east and the west? How can one compare Kievan Russias resemblances to western Europe and to the Byzantine Empire? How did Mediterranean trade and the Crusades help revive western Europe?

THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE, 6001200

he Byzantine emperors established Christianity as their ofcial religion (see Chapter 5). They also represented a continuation of Roman imperial rule and tradition that was largely absent in the kingdoms that succeeded Rome in the west. Byzantium inherited imperial law intact; only provincial forms of Roman law

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survived in the west. Combining the imperial role with political oversight over the Christian church, the emperors made a comfortable transition into the role of allpowerful Christian monarchs. The Byzantine drama, however, played on a steadily shrinking stage. Territorial losses and almost constant military pressure from north and south deprived the empire of long periods of peace.

Having a single ruler endowed with supreme legal and religious authority prevented the breakup of the Eastern Empire into petty principalities, but a series of territorial losses sapped the empires strength. Between 634 and

An Empire Beleaguered

650, Arab armies destroyed the Sasanid Empire and captured Byzantine Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia (see Chapter 8). Islam posed a religious as well as a political challenge. By the end of the twelfth century, some two-thirds of the Christians in these former Byzantine territories had adopted the Muslim faith (see Map 9.1). The loss of such populous and prosperous provinces shook the empire and reduced its power. Although it had largely recovered and reorganized militarily by the tenth century, it never regained the lost lands. Though Crusaders from western Europe established short-lived Christian principalities at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea in the eleventh century, the Byzantines found them almost as hostile as the Muslims (see

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C
600

Western Europe

Eastern Europe
634650 Muslims conquer Byzantine provinces of Syria, Egypt, and Tunisia

711 Muslim conquest of Spain 732 Battle of Tours

800

800 Coronation of Charlemagne 843 Treaty of Verdun divides Carolingian Empire among Charlemagnes grandsons 882 Varangians take control of Kiev 910 Monastery of Cluny founded 962 Beginning of Holy Roman Empire 980 Vladimir becomes grand prince of Kievan Russia

1000
1054 Formal schism between Latin and Orthodox Churches 1066 Normans under William the Conqueror invade England 1077 Climax of investiture controversy 1095 Pope Urban II preaches First Crusade

1200

10811118 Alexius Comnenus rules Byzantine Empire, calls for western military aid against Muslims 1204 Western knights sack Constantinople in Fourth Crusade

the section below on the Crusades). Eventually the empire succumbed to Muslim conquest in 1453. The later Byzantine emperors faced new enemies in the north and south. Following the wave of Germanic migrations (see Chapter 5), Slavic and Turkic peoples appeared on the northern frontiers as part of centurieslong and poorly understood population migrations in Eurasian steppe lands. Other Turks led by the Seljuk family became the primary foe in the south (see Chapter 8). At the same time, relations with the popes and princes of western Europe steadily worsened. In the mid-ninth century the patriarchs of Constantinople had challenged the territorial jurisdiction of the popes of Rome and some of the practices of the Latin Church. These arguments worsened over time and in 1054 culminated in a formal schism between the Latin Church and the Orthodox Churcha break that has been only partially mended.
Schism (SKIZ-uhm)

Imperial authority and urban prosperity in the eastern provinces of the late Roman Empire initially sheltered Byzantium from many of the economic reverses and population losses suffered by western Europe. However, the two regions shared a common demographic crisis during a sixth-century epidemic of bubonic plague known as the plague of Justinian, named after the emperor who ruled from 527 to 565. A similar though gradual and less pronounced social transformation set in around the seventh century, possibly sparked by further epidemics and the loss of Egypt and Syria to the Muslims. Narrative histories tell us little, but popular narratives of saints lives show a transition from stories about educated saints hailing from cities to stories about saints who originated as peasants. In many areas, barter replaced money transactions; some cities declined in population and wealth; and the traditional class of local urban notables nearly disappeared.

Society and Urban Life

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doxically, however, from 1028 to 1056 women ruled the Byzantine Empire alongside their husbands. These social changes and the apparent increase in the seclusion of women resemble simultaneous developments in neighboring Islamic countries, but historians have not uncovered any rm linkage between them. Economically, the Byzantine emperors continued the Late Roman inclination to set prices, organize grain shipments to the capital, and monopolize trade in luxury goods like Tyrian purple cloth. Such government intervention may have slowed technological development and economic innovation. So long as merchants and pilgrims hastened to Constantinople from all points of the compass, aristocrats could buy rare and costly goods. Just as the provisioning and physical improvement of Rome overshadowed the development of other cities at the height of the Roman Empire, so other Byzantine cities suffered from the intense focus on Constantinople. In the countryside, Byzantine farmers continued to use slow oxcarts and light scratch plows, which were efcient for many, but not all, soil types, long after farmers in western Europe had begun to adopt more efcient techniques (see below). Because Byzantiums Roman inheritance remained so much more intact than western Europes, few people recognized the slow deterioration. Gradually, however, pilgrims and visitors from the west saw the reality beyond the awe-inspiring, incense-lled domes of cathedrals and beneath the glitter and silken garments of the royal court. An eleventh-century French visitor wrote:
The city itself [Constantinople] is squalid and fetid and in many places harmed by permanent darkness, for the wealthy overshadow the streets with buildings and leave these dirty, dark places to the poor and to travelers; there murders and robberies and other crimes which love the darkness are committed. Moreover, since people live lawlessly in this city, which has as many lords as rich men and almost as many thieves as poor men, a criminal knows neither fear nor shame, because crime is not punished by law and never entirely comes to light. In every respect she exceeds moderation; for, just as she surpasses other cities in wealth, so too, does she surpass them in vice.3

As the urban elite class shrank, the importance of high-ranking aristocrats at the imperial court and of rural landowners increased. Power organized by family began to rival power from class-based ofceholding. By the end of the eleventh century, a family-based military aristocracy had emerged. Of Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus (r. 10811118) it was said: He considered himself not a ruler, but a lord, conceiving and calling the empire his own house.2 The situation of women changed, too. Although earlier Roman family life was centered on a legally all-powerful father, women had enjoyed comparative freedom in public. After the seventh century women increasingly found themselves conned to the home. Some sources indicate that when they went out, they concealed their faces behind veils. The only men they socialized with were family members. ParaAlexius Comnenus (uh-LEX-see-uhs kom-NAY-nuhs)

A Byzantine contemporary, Anna Comnena, the brilliant daughter of Emperor Alexius Comnenus, expressed the view from the other side. She scornfully described a prominent churchman and philosopher who happened to be from Italy: Italos . . . was unable with his barbaric, stupid temperament to grasp the profound truths of philosophy; even in the act of learning he utterly rejected

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the teachers guiding hand, and full of temerity and barbaric folly, [believed] even before study that he excelled all others.4

looters and pillagers might appear at any moment, a local lord with a castle at which peasants could take refuge counted for more than a distant king. Dependency of weak people on strong people became a hallmark of the post-Roman period in western Europe.

Cultural Achievements

Though the greatest Byzantine architectural monument, Constantinoples Hagia Sophia (Sacred Wisdom) cathedral, dates to the reign of Justinian, artistic creativity continually manifested itself in the design and ornamentation of other churches and monasteries. Byzantine religious art, featuring stiff but arresting images of holy gures against gold backgrounds, strongly inuenced painting in western Europe down to the thirteenth century, and Byzantine musical traditions strongly affected the chanting employed in medieval Latin churches. Another important Byzantine achievement dates to the empires long period of political decline. In the ninth century brothers named Cyril and Methodius embarked on a highly successful mission to the Slavs of Moravia (part of the modern Czech Republic). They preached in the local language, and their followers perfected a writing system, called Cyrillic, that came to be used by Slavic Christians adhering to the Orthodoxthat is, Byzantinerite. Their careers also mark the beginning of a competition between the Greek and Latin forms of Christianity for the allegiance of the Slavs. The use today of the Cyrillic alphabet among the Russians and other Slavic peoples of Orthodox Christian faith, and of the Roman alphabet among the Poles, Czechs, and Croatians, testies to this competition (see the section below on Kievan Russia).

EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE, 6001000

he disappearance of the imperial legal framework that had persisted to the nal days of the Western Roman Empire (see Chapter 5) and the rise of various kings, nobles, and chieftains changed the legal and political landscape of western Europe. In region after region, the family-based traditions of the Germanic peoples, which often t local conditions better than previous practices, supplanted the edicts of the Roman emperors. Fear and physical insecurity led communities to seek the protection of local strongmen. In places where
Hagia Sophia (AH-yah SOH-fee-uh) Cyrillic (sih-RIL-ik)

In 711 a frontier raiding party of Arabs and Berbers, acting under the authority of the Umayyad caliph in Syria, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and overturned the kingdom of the Visigoths in Spain (see Chapter 8). The disunited Europeans could not stop them from consolidating their hold on the Iberian Peninsula. After pushing the remaining Christian chieftains into the northern mountains, the Muslims moved on to France. They occupied much of the southern coast and penetrated as far north as Tours, less than 150 miles (240 kilometers) from the English Channel, before Charlemagnes grandfather, Charles Martel, stopped their most advanced raiding party in 732. Military effectiveness was the key element in the rise of the Carolingian family (from Latin Carolus, Charles), rst as protectors of the Frankish kings, then as kings themselves under Charlemagnes father Pepin (r. 751 768), and nally, under Charlemagne, as emperors. At the peak of Charlemagnes power, the Carolingian Empire encompassed all of Gaul and parts of Germany and Italy, with the pope ruling part of the latter. When Charlemagnes son, Louis the Pious, died, the Germanic tradition of splitting property among sons led to the Treaty of Verdun (843), which split the empire into three parts. French-speaking in the west (France) and middle (Burgundy), and German-speaking in the east (Germany), the three regions never reunited. Nevertheless, the Carolingian economic system based on landed wealth and a brief intellectual revival sponsored personally by Charlemagnethough he himself was illiterateprovided a common heritage. A new threat to western Europe appeared in 793, when the Vikings, sea raiders from Scandinavia, attacked and plundered a monastery on the English coast, the rst of hundreds of such raids. Local sources from France, the British Isles, and Muslim Spain attest to widespread dread of Viking warriors descending from multi-oared, dragon-prowed boats to pillage monasteries, villages, and towns. Viking shipbuilders made versatile vessels that could brave the stormy North Atlantic and also maneuver up rivers to attack inland towns. In the ninth century raiders from Denmark and Norway

A Time of Insecurity

Carolingian (kah-roe-LIN-gee-uhn)

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harried the British and French coasts (see Diversity and Dominance: Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg and the Christianization of the Scandinavians and Slavs) while Varangians (Swedes) pursued raiding and trading interests, and eventually the building of kingdoms, along the rivers of eastern Europe and Russia, as we shall see. Although many Viking raiders sought booty and slaves, in the 800s and 900s Viking captains organized the settlement of Iceland, Greenland, and, around the year 1000, Vinland on the northern tip of Newfoundland. Vikings long settled on lands they had seized in Normandy (in northwestern France) organized the most important and ambitious expeditions in terms of numbers of men and horses and long-lasting impact. William the Conqueror, the duke of Normandy, invaded England in 1066 and brought Anglo-Saxon domination of the island to an end. Other Normans (from north men) attacked Muslim Sicily in the 1060s and, after thirty years of ghting, permanently severed it from the Muslim world.

Archaeology and records kept by Christian monasteries and convents reveal a profound economic transformation that accompanied the new Germanic political order. The new rulers cared little for the urban-based civilization of the Romans, which accordingly shrank in importance. Though the pace of change differed from region to region, most cities lost population, in some cases becoming villages. Roman roads fell into disuse and disrepair. Small thatched houses sprang up beside abandoned villas, and public buildings made of marble became dilapidated in the absence of the laborers, money, and civic leadership needed to maintain them. Paying for purchases in coin largely gave way to bartering goods and services. Trade across the Mediterranean did not entirely stop after the Muslim conquests; occasional shipments from Egypt and Syria continued to reach western ports. But most of western Europe came to rely on meager local resources. These resources, moreover, underwent redistribution. Roman centralization had channeled the wealth and production of the empire to the capital, which in turn radiated Roman cultural styles and tastes to the provinces. As Roman governors were replaced by Germanic territorial lords who found the riches of their own culture more appealing than those of Rome, local self-

A Self-Sufcient Economy

sufciency became more important. The decline of literacy and other aspects of Roman life made room for the growth of Germanic cultural traditions. The diet in the northern countries featured beer, lard or butter, and bread made of barley, rye, or wheat, all supplemented by pork from herds of swine fed on forest acorns and beechnuts, and by game from the same forests. Nobles ate better than peasants, but even the peasant diet was reasonably balanced. The Roman diet based on wheat, wine, and olive oil persisted in the south. The average western European of the ninth century was probably better nourished than his or her descendants three hundred years later, when population was increasing and the nobility monopolized the resources of the forests. In both north and south, self-sufcient farming estates known as manors became the primary centers of agricultural production. Fear of attack led many common farmers in the most vulnerable regions to give their lands to large landowners in return for political and physical protection. The warfare and instability of the post-Roman centuries made unprotected country houses especially vulnerable to pillaging. Isolated by poor communications and lack of organized government, landowners depended on their own resources for survival. Many became warriors or maintained a force of armed men. Others swore allegiance to landowners who had armed forces to protect them. A well-appointed manor possessed elds, gardens, grazing lands, sh ponds, a mill, a church, workshops for making farm and household implements, and a village where the farmers dependent on the lord of the manor lived. Depending on local conditions, protection ranged from a ditch and wooden stockade to a stone wall surrounding a fortied keep (a stone building). Fortication tended to increase until the twelfth century, when stronger monarchies made it less necessary. Manor life reected personal status. Nobles and their families exercised almost unlimited power over the serfsagricultural workers who belonged to the manor, tilled its elds, and owed other dues and obligations. Serfs could not leave the manor where they were born and attach themselves to another lord. Most peasants in England, France, and western Germany were unfree serfs in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In Bordeaux, Saxony, and a few other regions free peasantry survived based on the egalitarian social structure of the Germanic peoples during their period of migration. Outright slavery, the mainstay of the Roman economy (see Chapter

Varangians (va-RAN-gee-anz)

Bordeaux (bore-DOE)

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5), diminished as more and more peasants became serfs in return for a lords protection. The enslavement of prisoners to serve as laborers became less important as an object of warfare.

Europes reversion to a selfsufcient economy limited the freedom and potential for personal achievement of most people, but an emerging class of nobles reaped great benets. During the Germanic migrations and later among the Vikings of Scandinavia, men regularly answered the call to arms issued by war chiefs, to whom they swore allegiance. All warriors shared in the booty gained from raiding. As settlement enhanced the importance of agricultural tasks, laying down the plow and picking up the sword at the chieftains call became harder. Those who, out of loyalty or desire for adventure, continued to join the war parties included a growing number of horsemen. Mounted warriors became the central force of the Carolingian army. At rst, ghting from horseback did not make a person either a nobleman or a landowner. By the tenth century, however, nearly constant warfare to protect land rights or support the claims of a lord brought about a gradual transformation in the status of the mounted warrior, which led, at different rates in different areas, to landholding becoming almost inseparable from military service. In trying to understand long-standing traditions of landholding and obligation, lawyers in the sixteenth century and later simplied thousands of individual agreements into a neat system they called feudalism, from Latin feodum, meaning a land awarded for military service. It became common to refer to medieval Europe as a feudal society in which kings and lords gave land to vassals in return for sworn military support. By analyzing original records, more recent historians have discovered this to be an oversimplication. Relations between landholders and serfs and between lords and vassals differed too much from one place to another, and from one time to another, to t together in anything resembling a system. The German foes of the Roman legions had equipped themselves with helmets, shields, and swords, spears, or throwing axes. Some rode horses, but most fought on foot. Before the invention of the stirrup by Central Asian pastoralists in approximately the rst century C.E., horsemen had gripped their mounts with their legs and fought with bows and arrows, throwing javelins, stabbing spears, and swords. Stirrups allowed a rider to stand in the sad-

Early Medieval Society in the West

dle and absorb the impact when his lance struck an enemy at full gallop. This type of warfare required grain-fed horses that were larger and heavier than the small, grassfed animals of the Central Asian nomads, though smaller and lighter than the draft horses bred in later times for hauling heavy loads. Thus agricultural Europe rather than the grassy steppes produced the charges of armored knights that came to dominate the battleeld. By the eleventh century, the knight, called by different terms in different places, had emerged as the central gure in medieval warfare. He wore an open-faced helmet and a long linen shirt, or hauberk, studded with small metal disks. A century later, knightly equipment commonly included a visored helmet that covered the head and neck and a hauberk of chain mail. Each increase in armor for knight and horse entailed a greater nancial outlay. Since land was the basis of wealth, a knight needed nancial support from land revenues. Accordingly, kings began to reward armed service with grants of land from their own property. Lesser nobles with extensive properties built their own military retinues the same way. A grant of land in return for a pledge to provide military service was often called a ef. At rst, kings granted efs to their noble followers, known as vassals, on a temporary basis. By the tenth century, most efs could be inherited as long as the specied military service continued to be provided. Though patterns varied greatly, the association of landholding with military service made the medieval society of western Europe quite different from the contemporary city-based societies of the Islamic world. Kings and lords might be able to command the service of their vassals for only part of the year. Vassals could hold land from several different lords and owe loyalty to each one. Moreover, the allegiance that a vassal owed to one lord could entail military service to that lords master in time of need. A typical medieval realmactual practices varied between and within realmsconsisted of lands directly owned by a king or a count and administered by his royal ofcers. The kings or counts major vassals held and administered other lands, often the greater portion, in return for military service. These vassals, in turn, granted land to their own vassals. The lord of a manor provided governance and justice, direct royal government being quite limited. The king had few nancial resources and seldom exercised legal jurisdiction at a local level. Members of the clergy, as well as the extensive agricultural lands owned by
hauberk (HAW-berk)

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I V E R S I T Y

A N D

O M I N A N C E

ARCHBISHOP ADALBERT OF HAMBURG AND THE CHRISTIANIZATION OF THE SCANDINAVIANS AND SLAVS
dam of Bremens History of the Archbishops of HamburgBremen, consists of four sections. The third is devoted to the Archbishop Adalbert, whose death in 1072 stirred Adam to write. References to classical poets, the lives of saints, and royal documents show that Adam, a churchman, had a solid education and access to many sources. He also drew on living informants, in particular the Danish king Svein Estrithson, a nephew of Canute, king of England from 1015 to 1035, and father-in-law of Gottschalk, a lord over the Slavs mentioned below. The excerpts below illustrate the close connection between political and religious institutions in establishing a structure of domination in lands on the European frontier.

Archbishop Adalbert held the see for twenty-nine years. He received the pastoral staff from the [Holy Roman] Emperor Henry, the son of Conrad, who was, counting from Caesar Augustus, the ninetieth Roman emperor to sit upon the throne . . . The archiepiscopal pallium [i.e., bishops cloak] was brought to him . . . by legates from the Pope Benedict . . . [who] was the one hundred and forty-seventh after the Apostles in the succession of Roman pontiffs. His consecration took place in Aachen in the presence of Caesar and of the princes of the realm. Twelve bishops assisted and laid their hands on him . . . This remarkable man may for all that be extolled with praise of every kind in that he was noble, handsome, wise, eloquent, chaste, temperate. All these qualities he comprised in himself and others besides, such as one is wont to attach to the outer man: that he was rich, that he was successful, that he was glorious, that he was inuential. All these things were his in abundance. Moreover, in respect of the mission to the heathen, which is the rst duty of the Church at Hamburg, no one so vigorous could ever be found . . . Although he was such in the beginning, he seemed to fail toward the end. Not being well on his guard against any defect in his virtue, the man met with ruin as much through his own negligence as through the driving malice of others . . . Keen and well trained of mind, he was skillful in many arts. In things divine and human he was possessed of great

prudence and was well known for retaining in memory and setting forth with matchless eloquence what he had acquired by hearing or by study. Then, besides, although handsome in physical form, he was a lover of chastity. His generosity was of a kind that made him regard asking favors as unworthy, that made him slow and humble in accepting them but prompt and cheerful in giving, often generously, to those who had not asked. His humility appears doubtful in that he exhibited it only in respect of the servants of God, the poor, and pilgrims, and it went to such lengths that before retiring he often would on bended knees personally wash the feet of thirty or more beggars. To the princes of the world, however, and to his peers he would in no way stoop. Toward them he even broke out at times with a vehemence that at last spared no one he thought outstanding. Some he upbraided for luxury, others for greed, still others for indelity . . . On seeing that the basilica [i.e., cathedral] which had lately been started was an immense structure requiring very great resources, he with too precipitate judgment immediately had the city wall, begun by his predecessors, pulled down, as if it were not at all necessary, and ordered its stones built into the temple. Even the beautiful tower, . . . tted out with seven chambers, was then razed to its foundations . . . Alebrand before him had begun [the cathedral] in the style of the church at Cologne [in western Germany], but he planned to carry it out in the manner of the cathedral at Benevento [in southern Italy] . . . And because the great prelate saw that his Church and bishopric . . . was troubled again by the iniquitous might of the dukes, he made a supreme effort to restore to that Church its former freedom, that thus neither the duke nor the count nor any person of judicial position would have any right or power in his diocese. But this objective could not be attained without incurring hatred, since the wrath of the princes, rebuked for their wickedness, would be further inamed. And they say that Duke Bernhard, who held the archbishop under suspicion because of his nobility and wisdom, often said that Adalbert had been stationed in this country like a spy, to betray the weaknesses of the land to the aliens

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and to Caesar. Consequently the duke declared that as long as he or any of his sons lived, the bishop should not have a happy day in the bishopric . . . As soon as the metropolitan [i.e., Archbishop Adalbert] had entered upon his episcopate, he sent legates to the kings of the north in the interest of friendship. There were also dispersed throughout all Denmark and Norway and Sweden and to the ends of the earth admonitory letters in which he exhorted the bishops and priests living in those parts . . . fearlessly to forward the conversion of the pagans . . . [Svein, the Danish king who died after invading England in 1013 and left his throne to his son Canute] forgot the heavenly King as things prospered with him and married a blood relative from Sweden. This mightily displeased the lord archbishop, who sent legates to the rash king, rebuking him severely for his sin, and who stated nally that if he did not come to his senses, he would have to be cut off with the sword of excommunication. Beside himself with rage, the king then threatened to ravage and destroy the whole diocese of Hamburg. Unperturbed by these threats, our archbishop, reproving and entreating, remained rm, until at length the Danish tyrant was prevailed upon by letters from the pope to give his cousin a bill of divorce. Still the king would not give ear to the admonitions of the priests. Soon after he had put aside his cousin he took to himself other wives and concubines, and again still others . . . While these events were taking place there, the most Christian king of the Swedes, James, departed this world, and his brother, Edmund the Bad, succeeded him. He was born of a concubine by Olaf [the Lapp King] and, although he had been baptized, took little heed of our religion. He had with him a certain bishop named Osmund, of irregular status, whom the bishop of the Norwegians, Sigefrid, had once commended to the school at Bremen for instruction. But later he forgot these kindnesses and went to Rome for consecration. When he was rejected there, he wandered about through many parts and so nally secured consecration from a Polish archbishop. Going to Sweden then, he boasted that he had been consecrated archbishop for those parts. But when our archbishop sent his legates to King [Edmund], they found this same vagabond Osmund there, having the cross borne before him after the manner of an archbishop. They also heard that he had by his unsound teaching of our faith corrupted the barbarians, who were still neophytes [i.e., beginners] . . . In Norway . . . King Harold surpassed all the madness of tyrants in his savage wildness. Many churches were destroyed by that man; many Christians were tortured to death by him. But he was a mighty man and renowned for the victories he had previously won in many wars with barbarians in Greece and in the Scythian regions [i.e., while assisting the Byzantine empress Zo ght the Seljuk Turks]. After he came into his fatherland, however, he never ceased from warfare;

he was the thunderbolt of the north . . . And so, as he ruled over many nations, he was odious to all on account of his greed and cruelty. He also gave himself up to the magic arts and, wretched man that he was, did not heed the fact that his most saintly brother [i.e., Saint Olaf, one of Harolds predecessors] had eradicated such illusions from the realm and striven even unto death for the adoption of the precepts of Christianity . . . Across the Elbe [i.e., east of the river Hamburg is on] and in Slavia our affairs were still meeting with great success. For Gottschalk . . . married a daughter of the Danish king and so thoroughly subdued the Slavs that they feared him like a king, offered to pay tribute, and asked for peace with subjection. Under these circumstances our Church at Hamburg enjoyed peace, and Slavia abounded in priests and churches . . . Gottschalk is said to have been inamed with such ardent zeal for the faith that, forgetting his station, he frequently made discourse in church in exhortation of the peoplein church because he wished to make clearer in the Slavic speech what was abstrusely preached by the bishops or priests. Countless was the number of those who were converted every day; so much so that he sent into every province for priests. In the several cities were then also founded monasteries for holy men who lived according to canonical rule . . . I have also heard the most veracious king of the Danes say . . . that the Slavic peoples without doubt could easily have been converted to Christianity long ago but for the avarice of the Saxons. They are, he said, more intent on the payment of tribute than on the conversion of the heathen. Nor do these wretched people realize with what great danger they will have to atone for their cupidity, they who through their avarice in the rst place threw Christianity in Slavia into disorder, in the second place have by their cruelty forced their subjects to rebel, and who now by their desire only for money hold in contempt the salvation of a people who wish to believe . . . QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS 1. Using this work as a historical source, what would you consider the main concerns of the church in northern Germany? 2. How does Adam distinguish Christians from pagans in his descriptive passages? 3. What appears to be the relationship between ecclesiastical lords like the archbishop and the secular kings and dukes?

Source: Excerpts from History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, tr. Francis J. Tschan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959 [new ed. 2002]), 114133. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

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monasteries and nunneries, fell under the jurisdiction of the church, which further limited the reach and authority of the monarch. Noblewomen became enmeshed in this tangle of obligations as heiresses and as candidates for marriage. A man who married the widow or daughter of a lord with no sons could gain control of that lords property. Marriage alliances affected entire kingdoms. Noble daughters and sons had little say in marriage matters; issues of land, power, and military service took precedence. Noblemen guarded the women in their families as closely as their other valuables. Nevertheless, women could own land. A noblewoman sometimes administered her husbands estates when he was away at war. Nonnoble women usually worked alongside their menfolk, performing agricultural tasks such as raking and stacking hay, shearing sheep, and picking vegetables. As artisans, women spun, wove, and sewed clothing. The Bayeux Tapestry, a piece of embroidery 230 feet (70 meters) long and 20 inches (51 centimeters) wide depicting William the Conquerors
Bayeux (bay-YUH)

invasion of England in 1066, was designed and executed entirely by women, though historians do not agree on who those women were.

THE WESTERN CHURCH

ust as the Christian populations in eastern Europe followed the religious guidance of the patriarch of Constantinople appointed by the Byzantine emperor, so the pope commanded similar authority over church affairs in western Europe. And just as missionaries in the east spread Christianity among the Slavs, so missionaries in the west added territory to Christendom with forays into the British Isles and the lands of the Germans. Throughout the period covered by this chapter Christian society was emerging and changing in both areas. In the west Roman nobles lost control of the papacythe ofce of the popeand it became a more powerful international ofce after the tenth century. Councils of bishopswhich normally set rules, called canons, to regulate the priests and laypeople (men and

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women who were not members of the clergy) under their jurisdictionbecame increasingly responsive to papal direction. Nevertheless, regional disagreements over church regulations, shortages of educated and trained clergy, difcult communications, political disorder, and the general insecurity of the period posed formidable obstacles to unifying church standards and practices. Clerics in some parts of western Europe were still issuing prohibitions against the worship of rivers, trees, and mountains as late as the eleventh century. Church problems included lingering polytheism, lax enforcement of prohibitions against marriage of clergy, nepotism (giving preferment to ones close kin), and simony (selling ecclesiastical appointments, often to people who were not members of the clergy). The persistence of the papacy in asserting its legal jurisdiction over clergy, combating polytheism and heretical beliefs, and calling on secular rulers to recognize the popes authority, including unpopular rulings like a ban on rst-cousin marriage, constituted a rare force for unity and order in a time of disunity and chaos.

Hildebrand, an Italian monk, capped a career of reorganizing church nances when the cardinals (a group of senior bishops) meeting in Rome selected him to be Pope Gregory VII in 1073. His personal notion of the papacy (preserved among his letters) represented an extreme position, stating among other claims, that
The pope can be judged by no one; The Roman church has never erred and never will err till the end of time; The pope alone can depose and restore bishops; He alone can call general councils and authorize canon law; He can depose emperors; He can absolve subjects from their allegiance; All princes should kiss his feet.5

In politically fragmented western Europe, the pope needed allies. Like his son, Charlemagnes father Pepin was a strong supporter of the papacy. The relationship between kings and popes was tense, however, since both thought of themselves as ultimate authorities. In 962 the pope crowned the rst Holy Roman Emperor (Charlemagne never held this full title). This designation of a secular political authority as the guardian of general Christian interests proved more apparent then real. Essentially a loose confederation of German princes who named one of their own to the highest ofce, the Holy Roman Empire had little inuence west of the Rhine River. Although the pope crowned the early Holy Roman emperors, this did not signify political superiority. The law of the church (known as canon law because each law was called a canon) gave the pope exclusive legal jurisdiction over all clergy and church property wherever located. But bishops who held land as vassals owed military support or other services and dues to kings and princes. The secular rulers argued that they should have the power to appoint those bishops because that was the only way to guarantee fulllment of their duties as vassals. The popes disagreed. In the eleventh century, this conict over the control of ecclesiastical appointments came to a head.

Politics and the Church

Such claims antagonized lords and monarchs, who had become accustomed to investingthat is, conferring a ring and a staff as symbols of authority on bishops and abbots in their domains. Historians apply the term investiture controversy to the medieval struggle between the church and the lay lords to control ecclesiastical appointments; the term also refers to the broader conict of popes versus emperors and kings. When Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV deed Gregorys reforms, Gregory excommunicated him in 1076, thereby cutting him off from church rituals. Stung by the resulting decline in his inuence, Henry stood barefoot in the snow for three days outside a castle in northern Italy waiting for Gregory, a guest there, to receive him. Henrys formal act of penance induced Gregory to forgive him and restore him to the church; but the reconciliation, an apparent victory for the pope, did not last. In 1078 Gregory declared Henry deposed. The emperor then forced Gregory to ee from Rome to Salerno, where he died two years later. The struggle between the popes and the emperors continued until 1122, when a compromise was reached at Worms, a town in Germany. In the Concordat of Worms, Emperor Henry V renounced his right to choose bishops and abbots or bestow spiritual symbols upon them. In return, Pope Calixtus II permitted the emperor to invest papally appointed bishops and abbots with any lay rights or obligations before their spiritual consecration. Such compromises did not fully solve the problem, but they reduced tensions between the two sides. Assertions of royal authority triggered other conicts as well. Though barely twenty when he became king of England in 1154, Henry II, a great-grandson of William the Conqueror, instituted reforms designed to strengthen the power of the Crown and weaken the
Hildebrand (HILL-de-brand)

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nobility. He appointed traveling justices to enforce his laws. He made juries, a holdover from traditional Germanic law, into powerful legal instruments. He established the principle that criminal acts violated the kings peace and should be tried and punished in accordance with charges brought by the Crown instead of in response to charges brought by victims. Henry had a harder time controlling the church. His closest friend and chancellor, or chief administrator, Thomas Becket (ca. 11181170), lived the grand and luxurious life of a courtier. In 1162 Henry persuaded Becket to become a priest and assume the position of archbishop of Canterbury, the highest church ofce in England. Becket agreed but cautioned that from then on he would act solely in the interest of the church if it came into conict with the Crown. When Henry sought to try clerics accused of crimes in royal instead of ecclesiastical courts, Archbishop Thomas, now leading an austere and pious life, resisted. In 1170 four of Henrys knights, knowing that the king desired Beckets death, murdered the archbishop in Canterbury Cathedral. Their crime backred, and an outpouring of sympathy caused Canterbury to become a major pilgrimage center. In 1173 the pope declared the martyred Becket a saint. Henry allowed himself to be publicly whipped twice in penance for the crime, but his authority had been badly damaged. Henry IIs conict with Thomas Becket, like the Concordat of Worms, yielded no clear victor. The problem of competing legal traditions made political life in western Europe more complicated than in Byzantium or the lands of Islam (see Chapter 8). Feudal law, rooted in Germanic custom, gave supreme power to the king. Canon law, based on Roman precedent, visualized a single hierarchical legal institution with jurisdiction over all of Western Christendom. In the eleventh century Roman civil law, contained in the Corpus Juris Civilis (see Chapter 5), added a third tradition.

Monasticism featured prominently in the religious life of almost all medieval Christian lands. The origins of group monasticism lay in the eastern lands of the Roman Empire. Pre-Christian practices such as celibacy, continual devotion to prayer, and living apart from society (alone or in small groups) came together in Christian form in Egypt. The most important form of monasticism in western Europe, however, involved groups of monks or nuns living together in organized communities. The person most responsible for introducing this originally Egyp-

Monasticism

tian practice in the Latin west was Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480547) in Italy. Benedict began his pious career as a hermit in a cave but eventually organized several monasteries, each headed by an abbot. In the seventh century monasteries based on his model spread far beyond Italy. The Rule Benedict wrote to govern the monks behavior envisions a balanced life of devotion and work, along with obligations of celibacy, poverty, and obedience to the abbot. Those who lived by this or other monastic rules became regular clergy, in contrast to secular clergy, priests who lived in society instead of in seclusion and did not follow a formal code of regulations. The Rule of Benedict was the starting point for most forms of western European monastic life and remains in force today in Benedictine monasteries.

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Though monks and nuns, women who lived by monastic rules in convents, made up a small percentage of the total population, their secluded way of life reinforced the separation of religious affairs from ordinary politics and economics. Monasteries followed Jesus axiom to render unto Caesar what is Caesars and unto God what is Gods better than the many town-based bishops who behaved like lords. Monasteries preserved literacy and learning in the early medieval period, although some rulers, like Charlemagne, encouraged scholarship at court. Many illiterate lay nobles interested themselves only in warfare and hunting. Monks (but seldom nuns) saw copying manuscripts and even writing books as a religious calling. Monastic scribes preserved many ancient Latin works that would otherwise have disappeared. The survival of Greek works depended more on Byzantine and Muslim scribes in the east. Monasteries and convents served other functions as well (see Environment and Technology: Cathedral Organs). A few planted Christianity in new lands, as Irish monks did in parts of Germany. Most serviced the needs of travelers, organized agricultural production on their lands, and took in infants abandoned by their parents. Convents provided refuge for widows and other women who lacked male protection in the harsh medieval world or who desired a spiritual life. These religious houses presented problems of oversight to the church, however. A bishop might have authority over an abbot or abbess (head of a convent), but he could not exercise constant vigilance over what went on behind monastery walls. The failure of some abbots to maintain monastic discipline led to the growth of a reform movement centered on the Benedictine abbey of Cluny in eastern France. Founded in 910 by William the Pious, the rst duke of Aquitaine, who completely freed it of lay authority, Cluny gained similar freedom from the local bishop a century later. Its abbots pursued a vigorous campaign, eventually in alliance with reforming popes like Gregory VII, to improve monastic discipline and administration. A magnicent new abbey church symbolized Clunys claims to eminence. With later additions, it became the largest church in the world. At the peak of Clunys inuence, nearly a thousand Benedictine abbeys and priories (lower-level monastic houses) in various countries accepted the authority of its abbot. The Benedictine Rule had presumed that each monastery would be independent; the Cluniac reformers stipulated that every abbot and every prior (head of a priory) be appointed by the abbot of Cluny and have
Cluny (KLOO-nee)

personal experience of the religious life of Cluny. Monastic reform gained new impetus in the second half of the twelfth century with the rapid rise of the Cistercian order, which emphasized a life of asceticism and poverty. These movements set the pattern for the monasteries, cathedral clergy, and preaching friars that would dominate ecclesiastical life in the thirteenth century.

KIEVAN RUSSIA, 9001200

hough Latin and Orthodox Christendom followed different paths in later centuries, which had a more promising future was not apparent in 900. The Poles and other Slavic peoples living in the north eventually accepted the Christianity of Rome as taught by German priests and missionaries (see Diversity and Dominance: Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg and the Christianization of Scandinavians and Slavs). The Serbs and other southern Slavs took their faith from Constantinople. The conversion of Kievan Russia, farther to the east, shows how economics, politics, and religious life were closely intertwined. The choice of orthodoxy over Catholicism had important consequences for later European history.

The territory between the Black and Caspian Seas in the south and the Baltic and White Seas in the north divides into a series of east-west zones. Frozen tundra in the far north gives way to a cold forest zone, then to a more temperate forest, then to a mix of forest and steppe grasslands, and nally to grassland only. Several navigable rivers, including the Volga, the Dnieper, and the Don, run from north to south across these zones. Early historical sources reect repeated linguistic and territorial changes, seemingly under pressure from poorly understood population migrations. Most of the Germanic peoples, along with some Iranian and west Slavic peoples, migrated into eastern Europe from Ukraine and Russia in Roman times. The peoples who remained behind spoke eastern Slavic languages, except in the far north and south: Finns and related peoples lived in the former region, Turkic-speakers in the latter. Forest dwellers, farmers, and steppe nomads complemented each other economically. Nomads traded animals for the farmers grain; and honey, wax, and furs from

The Rise of the Kievan State

Dnieper (d-NYEP-er)

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the forest became important exchange items. Traders could travel east and west by steppe caravan (see Chapters 7 and 12), or they could use boats on the rivers to move north and south. Hoards containing thousands of Byzantine and Islamic coins buried in Poland and on islands in the Baltic Sea where fairs were held attest to the trading activity of Varangians (Swedish Vikings) who sailed across the Baltic and down Russias rivers. They exchanged forest products and slaves for manufactured goods and coins, which they may have used as jewelry rather than as money, at markets controlled by the Khazar Turks. The powerful Khazar kingdom centered around the mouth of the Volga River.

Historians debate the early meaning of the word Rus (from which Russia is derived), but at some point it came to refer to Slavic-speaking peoples ruled by Varangians. Unlike western European lords, the Varangian princes and their druzhina (military retainers) lived in cities, while the Slavs farmed. The princes occupied themselves with trade and fending off enemies. The Rus of the city of Kiev controlled trade on the Dnieper River and dealt more with Byzantium than with the Muslim world because the Dnieper ows into the Black Sea. The Rus of Novgorod played the same role on the Volga. The semi-

Kiev (KEE-yev)

Novgorod (NOHV-goh-rod)

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Cathedral Organs
he Christian church directly encouraged musical development. Pope Gregory I (d. 604) is traditionally credited with making a standard collection of chants then in use. Later, a special school in Rome trained choir directors who were sent out to teach the chants in cathedrals and monasteries. Organ accompaniment, initially in the form of long, sustained bass notes, came into common use by the end of the seventh

century. The organ worked by directing a current of air to a set of pipes of different lengths that could be opened or closed at one end. Each pipe sounded a tone as long as the air was owing past its open end. A monk named Wulstan (d. 963) described the organ installed in Winchester Cathedral in England: Twice six bellows above are ranged in a row, and fourteen lie below. These, by alternate blasts, supply an immense quantity of wind, and are worked by 70 strong men, laboring with their arms, covered with perspiration, each inciting his companions to drive the wind up with all his strength, that the full-bosomed box may speak with its 400 pipes, which the hand of the organist governs. Some when closed he opens, others when open he closes, as the individual nature of the varied sound requires. Two brethren of concordant spirit sit at the instrument . . . Like thunder their tones batter the ear, so that it may receive no sound but that alone. To such an amount does it reverberate, echoing in every direction, that everyone stops with his hand his gaping ears, being in no wise able to draw near and bear the sound, which so many combinations produce. A century later huge levers or keys came into use for opening and closing the pipes. Each was several inches in width, one or two inches thick, and up to three feet in length. So much muscle was required to operate the keys that organists were called organ pounders. Over time, organs became smaller and capable of playing magnicent music.

Source: Alexander Russell, Organ, The International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians, ed. Oscar Thompson (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1943), 1315.

legendary account of the Kievan Rus conversion to Christianity must be seen against this background. In 980 Vladimir I, a ruler of Novgorod who had fallen from power, returned from exile to Kiev with a band of Varangians and made himself the grand prince of Kievan Russia (see Map 9.2). Though his grandmother Olga had
Vladimir (VLAD-ih-mir)

been a Christian, Vladimir built a temple on Kievs heights and placed there the statues of the six gods his Slavic subjects worshipped. The earliest Russian chronicle reports that Vladimir and his advisers decided against Islam as the ofcial religion because of its ban on alcohol, rejected Judaism (the religion to which the Khazars had converted) because they thought that a truly powerful god would not have let the ancient Jewish kingdom be destroyed, and

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even spoke with German emissaries advocating Latin Christianity. Why Vladimir chose Orthodox Christianity over the Latin version is not precisely known. The magnicence of Constantinople seems to have been a consideration. After visiting Byzantine churches, his agents reported: We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for on earth there is no such splendor of [sic] such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is ner than the ceremonies of other nations.6 After choosing a reluctant bride from the Byzantine imperial family, Vladimir converted to Orthodox Christianity, probably in 988, and opened his lands to Orthodox clerics and missionaries. The patriarch of Constantinople appointed a metropolitan (chief bishop) at Kiev to govern ecclesiastical affairs. Churches arose in Kiev, one of them on the ruins of Vladimirs earlier hilltop temple. Writing was introduced, using the Cyrillic alphabet devised earlier for the western Slavs. This extension of Orthodox Christendom northward provided a barrier against the eastward expansion of Latin Christianity. Kiev became rmly oriented toward trade with Byzantium and turned its back on the Muslim world, though the Volga trade continued through Novgorod. Struggles within the ruling family and with other enemies, most notably the steppe peoples of the south, marked the later political history of Kievan Russia. But down to the time of the Mongols in the thirteenth century (see Chapter 12), the state remained and served as an instrument for the Christianization of the eastern Slavs.

Society and Culture

In Kievan Russia political power derived from trade rather than from landholding, so the manorial agricultural system of western Europe never developed. Farmers practiced shifting cultivation of their own lands. They would burn a section of forest, then lightly scratch the ash-strewn surface with a plow. When fertility waned, they would move to another section of forest. Poor land and a short growing season in the most northerly latitudes made food scarce. Living on their own estates, the druzhina evolved from infantry into cavalry and focused their efforts more on horse breeding than on agriculture. Large cities like Kiev and Novgorod may have reached thirty thousand or fty thousand peopleroughly the size of contemporary London or Paris, but far smaller than Constantinople or major Muslim metropolises like Baghdad and Nishapur. Many cities amounted to little more than fortied trading posts. Yet they served as centers for the development of crafts, some, such as

glassmaking, based on skills imported from Byzantium. Artisans enjoyed higher status in society than peasant farmers. Construction relied on wood from the forests, although Christianity brought the building of stone cathedrals and churches on the Byzantine model. Christianity penetrated the general population slowly. Several polytheist uprisings occurred in the eleventh century, particularly in times of famine. Passive resistance led some groups to reject Christian burial and persist in cremating the dead and keeping the bones of the deceased in urns. Women continued to use polytheist designs on their clothing and bracelets, and as late as the twelfth century they were still turning to polytheist priests for charms to cure sick children. Traditional Slavic marriage practices involving casual and polygamous relations particularly scandalized the clergy. Christianity eventually triumphed, and its success led to increasing church engagement in political and economic affairs. In the twelfth century, Christian clergy became involved in government administration, some of them collecting fees and taxes related to trade. Direct and indirect revenue from trade provided the rulers with the money they needed to pay their soldiers. The rule of law also spread as Kievan Russia experienced its peak of culture and prosperity in the century before the Mongol invasion of 1237.

WESTERN EUROPE REVIVES, 10001200

etween 1000 and 1200 western Europe slowly emerged from nearly seven centuries of subsistence economyin which most people who worked on the land could meet only their basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Population and agricultural production climbed, and a growing food surplus found its way to town markets, speeding the return of a money-based economy and providing support for larger numbers of craftspeople, construction workers, and traders.

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Historians have attributed western Europes revival to population growth spurred by new technologies and to the appearance in Italy and Flanders, on the coast of the North Sea, of self-governing cities devoted primarily to seaborne trade. For monarchs, the changes facilitated improvements in central administration, greater control over vassals, and consolidation of realms on the way to becoming stronger kingdoms.

A lack of concrete evidence conrming the spread of technological innovations frustrates efforts to relate the exact course of Europes revival to technological change. Nevertheless, most historians agree that technology played a signicant role in the near doubling of the population of western Europe between 1000 and 1200. The population of England seems to have risen from 1.1 million in 1086 to 1.9 million in 1200, and the population of the territory of modern France seems to have risen from 5.2 million to 9.2 million over the same period. Examples that illustrate the difculty of drawing historical conclusions from scattered evidence of technological change were a new type of plow and the use of efcient draft harnesses for pulling wagons. The Roman plow, which farmers in southern Europe and Byzantium continued to use, scratched shallow grooves, as was appropriate for loose, dry Mediterranean soils. The new plow cut deep into the soil with a knife-like blade, while a curved board mounted behind the blade lifted the cut layer and turned it over. This made it possible to farm the heavy, wet clays of the northern river valleys. Pulling the new plow took more energy, which could mean harnessing several teams of oxen or horses. Horses plowed faster than oxen but were more delicate. Iron horseshoes, which were widely adopted in this period, helped protect their feet, but like the plow itself, they added to the farmers expenses. Roman horse harnesses, inefciently modeled on the yoke used for oxen, put such pressure on the animals neck that a horse pulling a heavy load risked strangulation. A mystery surrounds the adoption of more efcient designs. The horse collar, which moves the point of traction from the animals throat to its shoulders, rst appeared around 800 in a miniature painting, and it is shown clearly as a harness for plow horses in the Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered after 1066. The breast-strap harness, which is not as well adapted for the heaviest work but was preferred in southern Europe, seems to have appeared around 500. In both cases, linguists have tried to trace key technical terms to Chinese or Turko-Mongol words and have argued for technological diffusion across Eurasia. Yet third-

The Role of Technology

century Roman farmers in Tunisia and Libya used both types of harness to hitch horses and camels to plows and carts. This technology, which is still employed in Tunisia, appears clearly on Roman bas-reliefs and lamps; but there is no more evidence of its movement northward into Europe than there is of similar harnessing moving across Asia. Thus the question of where efcient harnessing came from and whether it began in 500 or in 800, or was known even earlier but not extensively used, cannot be easily resolved. Hinging on this problem is the question of when and why landowners in northern Europe began to use teams of horses to pull plows through moist, fertile river-valley soils that were too heavy for teams of oxen. Stronger and faster than oxen, horses increased productivity by reducing the time needed for plowing, but they cost more to feed and equip. Thus, while agricultural surpluses did grow and better plowing did play a role in this growth, areas that continued to use oxen and even old-style plows seem to have shared in the general population growth of the period.

Independent cities governed and defended by communes appeared rst in Italy and Flanders and then elsewhere. Communes were groups of leading citizens who banded together to defend their cities and demand the privilege of self-government from their lay or ecclesiastical lord. Lords who granted such privileges beneted from the communes economic dynamism. Lacking extensive farmlands, these cities turned to manufacturing and trade, which they encouraged through the laws they enacted. Laws making serfs free once they came into the city, for example, attracted many workers from the countryside. Cities in Italy that had shrunk within walls built by the Romans now pressed against those walls, forcing the construction of new ones. Pisa built a new wall in 1000 and expanded it in 1156. Other twelfth-century cities that built new walls include Florence, Brescia, Pavia, and Siena. Settlers on a group of islands at the northern end of the Adriatic Sea that had been largely uninhabited in Roman times organized themselves into the city of Venice. In the eleventh century it became the dominant sea power in the Adriatic. Venice competed with Pisa and Genoa, its rivals on the western side of Italy, for leadership in the trade with Muslim ports in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. A somewhat later merchants

Cities and the Rebirth of Trade

Brescia (BREH-shee-uh)

Siena (see-EN-uh)

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list mentions trade in some three thousand spices (including dyestuffs, textile bers, and raw materials), some of them products of Muslim lands and some coming via the Silk Road or the Indian Ocean trading system (see Chapter 7). Among them were eleven types of alum (for dyeing), eleven types of wax, eight types of cotton, four types of indigo, ve types of ginger, four types of paper, and fteen types of sugar, along with cloves, caraway, tamarind, and fresh oranges. By the time of the Crusades (see below), maritime commerce throughout the Mediterranean had come to depend heavily on ships from Genoa, Venice, and Pisa. Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres in Flanders rivaled the Italian cities in prosperity, trade, and industry. Enjoying comparable independence based on privileges granted by the counts of Flanders, these cities centralized the shing and wool trades of the North Sea region. Around 1200 raw wool from England began to be woven into woolen cloth for a very large market. More abundant coinage also signaled the upturn in economic activity. In the ninth and tenth centuries most gold coins had come from Muslim lands and the Byzantine Empire. Being worth too much for most trading purposes, they seldom reached Germany, France, and England. The widely imitated Carolingian silver penny sufced. With the economic revival of the twelfth century, minting of silver coins began in Scandinavia,

Poland, and other outlying regions. In the following century the reinvigoration of Mediterranean trade made possible a new and abundant gold coinage.

THE CRUSADES, 10951204

estern European revival coincided with and contributed to the Crusades, a series of religiously inspired Christian military campaigns against Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean that dominated the politics of Europe from 1095 to 1204 (see Chapter 8 and Map 9.3). Four great expeditions, the last redirected against the Byzantines and resulting in the Latin capture of Constantinople, constituted the regions largest military undertakings since the fall of Rome. The cultural impact of the Crusades upon western Europe resulted in noble courts and burgeoning cities consuming more goods from the east. This set the stage for the later adoption of ideas, artistic styles, and industrial processes from Byzantium and the lands of Islam.

The Roots of the Crusades

Bruges (broozh)

Ypres (EEP-r)

Several social and economic currents of the eleventh century contributed to the Crusades. First, reforming leaders of the Latin Church, seeking to soften the warlike tone of society, popularized the Truce of God. This movement

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limited ghting between Christian lords by specifying times of truce, such as during Lent (the forty days before Easter) and on Sundays. Many knights welcomed a religiously approved alternative to ghting other Christians. Second, ambitious rulers, like the Norman chieftains who invaded England and Sicily, were looking for new lands to conquer. Nobles, particularly younger sons in areas where the oldest son inherited everything, were hungry for land and titles to maintain their status. Third, Italian merchants wanted to increase trade in the eastern Mediterranean and acquire trading posts in Muslim territory. However, without the rivalry between popes and kings already discussed, and without the desire of the church to demonstrate political authority over western Christendom, the Crusades might never have occurred.

Several factors focused attention on the Holy Land, which had been under Muslim rule for four centuries. Pilgrimages played an important role in European religious life. In western Europe, pilgrims traveled under royal protection, a few actually being tramps, thieves, beggars, peddlers, and merchants for whom pilgrimage was a safe way of traveling. Genuinely pious pilgrims often journeyed to visit the old churches and sacred relics preserved in Rome or Constantinople. The most intrepid went to Jerusalem, Antioch, and other cities under Muslim control to fulll a vow or to atone for a sin. Knights who followed a popular pilgrimage route across northern Spain to pray at the shrine of Santiago de Compostela learned of the expanding efforts of Christian kings to dislodge the Muslims. The Umayyad

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Caliphate in al-Andalus had broken up in the eleventh century, leaving its smaller successor states prey to Christian attacks from the north (see Chapter 8). This was the beginning of a movement of reconquest that culminated in 1492 with the surrender of the last Muslim kingdom. The word crusade, taken from Latin crux for cross, was rst used in Spain. Stories also circulated of the war conducted by seafaring Normans against the Muslims in Sicily, whom they nally defeated in the 1090s after thirty years of ghting. The tales of pilgrims returning from Palestine further induced both churchmen and nobles to consider the Muslims a proper target for Christian militancy. Muslim rulers, who had controlled Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria since the seventh century, generally tolerated and protected Christian pilgrims. But after 1071, when a Seljuk army defeated the Byzantine emperor at the Battle of Manzikert (see Chapter 8), Turkish nomads spread throughout the region, and security along the pilgrimage route through Anatolia, already none too good, deteriorated further. The decline of Byzantine power threatened ancient centers of Christianity, such as Ephesus in Anatolia, previously under imperial control. Despite the theological differences between the Orthodox and Roman churches, the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus asked the pope and western European rulers to help him confront the Muslim threat and reconquer what the Christians termed the Holy Land, the early centers of Christianity in Palestine and Syria. Pope Urban II responded at the Council of Clermont in 1095. He addressed a huge crowd of people gathered in a eld and called on them, as Christians, to stop ghting one another and go to the Holy Land to ght Muslims. God wills it! exclaimed voices in the crowd. People cut cloth into crosses and sewed them on their shirts to symbolize their willingness to march on Jerusalem. Thus began the holy war now known as the First Crusade. People at the time more often used the word peregrinatio, pilgrimage. Urban promised to free crusaders who had committed sins from their normal penance, or acts of atonement, the usual reward for peaceful pilgrims to Jerusalem. The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099 and established four crusader principalities, the most important being the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The next two expeditions strove with diminishing success to protect these gains. Muslim forces retook Jerusalem in 1187. By the time of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the original religious ardor had so diminished that the commanders agreed, at the urging of the Venetians, to sack Constantinople rst to help pay the cost of transporting the army by ship.

Exposure to Muslim culture in Spain, Sicily, and the crusader principalities established in the Holy Land made many Europeans aware of things lacking in their own lives. Borrowings from Muslim society occurred gradually and are not always easy to date, but Europeans eventually learned how to manufacture pasta, paper, rened sugar, colored glass, and many other items that had formerly been imported. Arabic translations of and commentaries on Greek philosophical and scientic works, and

The Impact of the Crusades

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equally important original works by Arabs and Iranians, provided a vital stimulus to European thought. Some works were brought directly into the Latin world through the conquests of Sicily, parts of Spain and the Holy Land, and Constantinople (for Greek texts). Others were rendered into Latin by translators who worked in parts of Spain that continued under Muslim rule. Generations passed before all these works were studied and understood, but they eventually transformed the intellectual world of the western Europeans, who previously had had little familiarity with Greek writings. The works of Aristotle and the Muslim commentaries on them were of particular importance to theologians, but Muslim writers like Avicenna (9801037) were of parallel importance in medicine. Changes affecting the lifestyle of the nobles took place more quickly. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122?1204), one of the most inuential women of the crusading era, accompanied her husband, King Louis VII of France, on the Second Crusade (11471149). The court life of her uncle Raymond, ruler of the crusader principality of Antioch, particularly appealed to her. After her return to France, a lack of male offspring led to an annulment of her marriage with Louis, and she married Henry of Anjou in 1151. He inherited the throne of England as Henry II three years later. Eleanors sons Richard LionHeart, famed in romance as the chivalrous foe of Saladin during the Third Crusade (11891192), and John rebelled against their father but eventually succeeded him as kings of England. In Aquitaine, a powerful duchy in southern France, Eleanor maintained her own court for a time. The poetsingers called troubadours who enjoyed her favor made her court a center for new music based on the idea of courtly love, an idealization of feminine beauty and grace that inuenced later European ideas of romance. Thousands of troubadour melodies survive in manuscripts, and some show the inuence of the poetry styles then current in Muslim Spain. The favorite troubadour instrument, moreover, was the lute, a guitar-like instrument with a bulging shape whose design and name (Arabic al-ud ) come from Muslim Spain. In centuries to come the lute would become the mainstay of Renaissance music in Italy.

CONCLUSION

tian church. Byzantium guarded its shrinking frontiers against foreign invasion but gradually contracted around Constantinople, its imperial capital, as more and more territory was lost. By contrast, no Roman core survived in the west. The Germanic peoples overwhelmed the legions guarding the frontiers and established kingdoms based on their own traditions. The law of the king and the law of the church did not echo each other. Yet memories of Roman grandeur and territorial unity resurfaced with the idea of a Holy Roman Empire, however unworkable that empire proved to be. The competition between the Orthodox and Catholic forms of Christianity complicated the role of religion in the emergence of medieval European society and culture. The Byzantine Empire, constructed on a Roman political and legal heritage that had largely passed away in the west, was generally more prosperous than the Germanic kingdoms of western Europe, and its arts and culture were initially more sophisticated. Furthermore, Byzantine society became deeply Christian well before a comparable degree of Christianization had been reached in western Europe. Yet despite their success in transmitting their version of Christianity and imperial rule to Kievan Russia, and in the process erecting a barrier between the Orthodox Russians and the Catholic Slavs to their west, the Byzantines failed to demonstrate the dynamism and ferment that characterized both the Europeans to their west and the Muslims to their south. Byzantine armies played only a supporting role in the Crusades, and the emperors lost their capital and their power, at least temporarily, to western crusaders in 1204. Technology and commerce deepened the political and religious gulf between the two Christian zones. Changes in military techniques in western Europe increased battleeld effectiveness, while new agricultural technologies led to population increases that revitalized urban life and contributed to the crusading movement by making the nobility hunger for new lands. At the same time, the need to import food for growing urban populations contributed to the growth of maritime commerce in the Mediterranean and North Seas. Culture and manufacturing beneted greatly from the increased pace of communication and exchange. Lacking parallel developments of a similar scale, the Byzantine Empire steadily lost the dynamism of its early centuries and by the end of the period had clearly fallen behind western Europe in prosperity and cultural innovation.

he legacy of Roman rule affected eastern and western Europe in different ways. Byzantium inherited the grandeur, pomp, and legal supremacy of the imperial ofce and merged it with leadership of the Chris-

Key Terms
Charlemagne medieval Byzantine Empire

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Conclusion Kievan Russia schism manor serf ef vassal papacy Holy Roman Empire investiture controversy monasticism horse collar Crusades pilgrimage

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Italy Before the Renaissance (1991). On Germany and the Holy Roman Empire see Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, c. 8001056 (1991). On Spain see J. F. OCallaghan, A History of Medieval Spain (1975), and R. Collins, Early Medieval Spain: Unity and Diversity 4001000 (1983). On Viking Scandinavia see John Haywoods illustrated Encyclopaedia of the Viking Age (2000). Amy Kellers popularly written Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (1950) tells the story of an extraordinary woman. Dhuoda, Handbook for William: A Carolingian Womans Counsel for Her Son, trans. Carol Neel (1991), offers a rsthand look at a Carolingian noblewoman. More general works include Margaret Wades A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life (1986) and Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinssers A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present (1989). In the area of religion, Caroline Bynums Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (1982) illustrates new views about women. On Kievan Russia see Janet Martin, Medieval Russia, 9801584 (1995); Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus: 7501200 (1996); and Thomas S. Noonan, The Islamic World, Russia and the Vikings, 750900: The Numismatic Evidence (1998). Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (1987), is a standard work. He has also a more colorful version in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (1995). For other views see Jonathan Phillips, The Crusades, 10951197 (2002), and Norman Housley, Crusading and Warfare in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (2001). For a masterful account with a Byzantine viewpoint, see Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (1987). For accounts from the Muslim side see Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999). Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (1952), and Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 9501350 (1971), masterfully discuss the revival of trade. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond compile and translate primary documents in Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents with Introductions and Notes (1990).

Suggested Reading
Standard Byzantine histories include Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth (1971), and Warren Treadgold, A History of Byzantine State and Society (1997). Cyril Mangos Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (1980) emphasizes cultural matters. For later Byzantine history see A. P. Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein in Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1985), which stresses social and economic issues, and D. M. Nicol, Byzantium and Venice (1988). Roger Collinss Early Medieval Europe, 3001000 (1991) surveys institutional and political developments, while Robert Merrill Bartlett, The Making of Europe (1994), emphasizes frontiers. For the later part of the period see Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 9001300, 2d ed. (1997). Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, 4001500 (1989), stresses questions of social structure. Among many books on religious matters see Richard W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (1970), and Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion (1997). Susan Reynolds makes the case for avoiding the term feudalism in Fiefs and Vassals (1994). More specialized economic and technological studies begin with the classic Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962). See also Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300 900 (2002); C. M. Cipolla, Money, Prices and Civilization in the Mediterranean World, Fifth to Seventeenth Century (1956); and Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (1990), which includes translated documents. J. C. Russell, The Control of Late Ancient and Medieval Population (1985), analyzes demographic history and the problems of data. On France see the numerous works of Rosamond McKitterick, including The Frankish Kingdoms Under the Carolingians, 751 987 (1983). On England see Peter Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England (1977), and Christopher Brooke, The Saxon and Norman Kings, 3d ed. (2001). On Italy see Chris Wickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 4001000 (1981), and Edward Burman, Emperor to Emperor:

Notes
1. Lewis G. M. Thorpe, Two Lives of Charlemagne (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1969). 2. A. P. Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 71. 3. Ibid., 248. 4. Ibid., 255. 5. R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1970), 102. 6. S. A. Zenkovsky, ed., Medieval Russias Epics, Chronicles, and Tales (New York: New American Library, 1974), 67.

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Document-Based Question

Religion and Politics in Early Christian Europe

Using the following documents, analyze the relationship between rulers and religious leaders in early Christian Europe.

DOCUMENT 5 Excerpt from Pope Gregory VII (p. 229) DOCUMENT 6 Map 9.3 The Crusades ( p. 238)
How did Adam of Bremens education and religious beliefs affect his view of the Scandinavians and the Slavs (Document 4)? What additional types of documents would balance your understanding of the relationship between rulers and religious leaders in early Christian Europe?

DOCUMENT 1 Quote from Pope Leo III at the coronation of Charlemagne (p. 219) DOCUMENT 2 Excerpt about Emperor Alexius Comnenus (p. 222) DOCUMENT 3 Quote from Anna Comnena (p. 222) DOCUMENT 4 Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg and the Christianization of the Scandinavians and Slavs (Diversity and Dominance, p. 226)

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