When examining the history of Europe between the mid-tenth and early fourteenth centuries, it is helpful to consider some basic aspects
1 L. K. Little, ‘Romanesque Christianity in Germanic Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23 (1992-3), 453-74.
2 K. Leyser, ‘On the Eve of the First European revolution’, in his Communications and Power in Medieval Europe. Part II: The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1994), 1-19; R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution c.970-1215 (Oxford and Malden, MA, 2000).
Of the continent’s geography as well as its main political, religious, and cultural divisions. Geography has always exerted a strong influence upon European societies. Variations in climate, the physical landscape, and soil quality have largely determined land use, which in turn has had a huge impact upon political, social, and even religious organization. Arable cultivation tends to encourage the growth of nucleated settlements, as the population clusters together for mutual support in labour-intensive cultivation; however, such settlements are also easier to dominate, for farmers cannot afford to abandon their crops when threatened by military might. In European history, arable societies have typically experienced strong political control, and have also usually been wealthier and more populous than pastoral societies. Tending livestock, by contrast, is often a more solitary occupation, so that areas of primarily pastoral farming tend to be characterized by scattered hamlets or temporary settlements, weak political control, and relatively poor populations.
Europe has three main climates: temperate, Mediterranean, and continental. In the temperate zone a huge belt of potentially good farmland forms the North European Plain, which extends from the modern Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and Poland through northern Germany and the Low Countries to western France. The Mediterranean climate is relatively arid, and most of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea are also very mountainous, but despite their physical drawbacks many of these lands were already densely populated in 950 and more prosperous than their counterparts in north-west Europe. Muslim regions such as Valencia and Sicily benefited from complex irrigation systems that had been developed with Arab technology. However, forest clearances and marsh drainage were transforming the northern European landscape for several centuries before 950, and in the central Middle Ages they intensified, bringing vast tracts of land into cultivation and greatly increasing the prosperity of these regions. Ultimately some of the reclamation also had disastrous consequences, for by the late thirteenth century much of western Europe was dangerously overpopulated and relying ever more heavily upon poorer marginal soils for its sustenance, a situation that engendered terrible famines in the 1310s and 1320s. Further east, the great zone subject to a continental climate extends eastwards from the Great Hungarian Plain or Alfold towards the Russian forests and central Asian steppes. These regions, which experience the most extreme climatic variations in Europe, remained far more sparsely populated, although a steady stream of warriors, farmers, and traders migrated there from western Europe; the same regions also underwent periodic influxes of nomadic populations from the east.
The European mainland is broken up by several major mountain ranges, of which the most important are the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, Apennines, and Balkans (see Map 1). Although they served as important landmarks and obstructed communications, they did not hermetically seal off societies from one another. Each range was crossed by several passes, and transhumance* was common. In the central Middle Ages the Alps, which today mark the frontiers between several European states, lay within a single political entity, the (Holy Roman) Empire. Even though north Italian cities frequently exploited their strategic position at the southern end of the main Alpine passes to thwart imperial ambitions, their prosperity also depended upon those same routes. In the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal), the central plateau was always sparsely populated, and the Christian kings and lords who wished to dominate it repeatedly attempted to attract settlers from further north. The impact of the environment was even more significant for water-based transport. Europe is not strictly speaking a continent at all, but rather one of several peninsulas of the Eurasian land mass. The relative proximity of seas, fed by a series of navigable river systems, provided a viable network of communication: until the invention of the railways, water transport was invariably the easiest, cheapest, and—if the winds allowed—fastest means of travel.
Although the Byzantines, Muslims, and Mongols used systems of beacons or carrier pigeons for more rapid transmission of news, it is a truism that, until the invention of telegraphy in the nineteenth century, news in Europe could not travel over land faster than relays of horses. A late-twelfth-century example reveals both the possibilities and the limits of land communications. On 20 December 1192 Richard I ‘the Lionheart’, king of England, was taken prisoner near Vienna while returning from the Third Crusade. Word of his capture reached the Emperor Henry VI in central Germany by 28 December, and the king of France, Philip Augustus, in or near Paris, by c. 7 January 1193. This exceptionally weighty news had travelled about 630 miles as the crow flies within eighteen days, an average of 35 miles a day. That was an impressive rate of travel for an overland journey in the depths of winter, but it also shows that the peoples and rulers of medieval Christendom were too remote from one another to respond quickly to distant events.3 In 1215, Pope Innocent III wished to support King John of England against English rebels, but in central Italy he was always hopelessly out of touch with events in England, and his ill-informed interventions helped to plunge that country into a bitter civil war.
The limited nature of medieval communications meant that, throughout this period, the local symbols of authority—the castle on the hill, the parish church, the town wall or bridge—remained the chief symbols of authority to most of the population. Local networks also retained an overriding significance, whether ties of kinship or arrangements for trading and bartering. Yet there were also huge advances in improving communications (see p. 78). On land, the burgeoning population and the concern of princes and towns for order and trade encouraged improvements to roads, causeways, bridges, and ports. At sea, the longship, seaworthy but small, and the galley, unsuited to Atlantic storms, gave way to the much larger cog, which allowed merchant fleets to make annual trips from Italy to Southampton. The magnetic compass, already known in Europe in the twelfth century, was being used for navigation before the end of the thirteenth. So, too, were charted maps. In the tenth and eleventh centuries maps of the world were primarily representations of religious thought. They were based upon Classical Roman maps that organized the world into a simple tripartite scheme of Asia, Africa, and Europe, to which medieval mapmakers added the main sites, peoples, and creatures of the Bible and Classical mythology. These so-called mappae mundi (literally ‘cloths of the world’) were not intended to be mathematically accurate charts, but they have often led modern observers to exaggerate medieval ignorance of science and geography. In fact, some of the finest mappae mundi were produced around 1300, by which date relatively accurate charts or ‘portolans’* were being used in Mediterranean navigation, for they served very different purposes.
L. Landon, The Itinerary of Richard I (London, 1935), 71-2; cf. 184-91, 203.
World History
