The 370 years discussed in this book represent a period of momentous change in Europe. Between the mid-tenth and early fourteenth centuries, the population of the continent increased vastly, and European society became more urbanized, more literate, and more complex in both economic and cultural terms. In particular, ‘Latin Christian’ (Roman Catholic) culture grew to be more assertive and outwardly homogeneous and came to cover a much greater area, but simultaneously it acquired deep and enduring political divisions. Its aggressive character was expressed most forcefully in the Christian holy wars known to history as the Crusades. Its homogeneity grew from the ‘reform’ of the Roman Catholic Church, bequeathing Europe its great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals and its universities; the Church came under the vigorous direction of the papacy, which grew immensely in pretensions and in power. Latin Christendom’s hardening internal divisions are apparent in the emergence of dynastic kingdoms in France, the British Isles, southern Italy, the Iberian peninsula, east-central Europe, and Scandinavia, from which the modern European system of nation states is descended, and in the fragmentation of Germany and northern Italy into numerous principalities and autonomous ‘city states’.
Although modern Europeans owe much to the Europe of 700 or 1,000 years ago, they may well regard it as alien and primitive. Twenty-first-century Western culture is urban, globalized, and highly secular. It emphasizes the individual over the community and treats all people as free and equal—in theory at least—regardless of race, sex, birth, or beliefs. Its world of work is characterized by bureaucracy, mechanization, global communications, specialization, and near-universal literacy; its inhabitants are protected against all but the most virulent diseases by antibiotics and professional health care. In the popular imagination, the central Middle Ages seem like the very opposite of everything that today’s Europeans know and value. Medieval Europeans are conventionally depicted as inhabiting a deeply religious world in which adherence to the Christian Church was often brutally enforced, and learning was constrained by inflexible doctrine that made original thought dangerous. The clerical elite’s nearmonopoly of literacy served to maintain its position. The interests of the community and kin group prevailed over the interests of the individual at all levels of society, and social as well as religious dissent was often ruthlessly punished. The organization of society under kings and princes who claimed to rule by the grace of God ensured grave social inequalities: power and status were usually determined by birth, which brought rights to control land and the people who worked on it; a great many people were unfree, which meant that their lords restricted where they might live, where and when they might work, and whom they might marry. The economy was dominated by labour-intensive, poorly mechanized agriculture, and towns and industry remained very small by modern standards. Recurrent famines and epidemics devastated whole populations, and life expectancy was short. Few people travelled beyond their immediate region, and little was known of the non-European world: distant lands were believed to be populated by fabulous creatures and subhuman savages. Depicted like this, medieval Europe seems strange and repellent.
Some modern feelings of repugnance are due to misunderstanding. It is simply not true, for instance, that the Church taught that the world was flat and persecuted as heretics those who believed it was round; on the contrary, it was well known in the Middle Ages that the world was spherical. Nevertheless, no medievalist would deny that there is much about medieval culture that seems unattractive. No doubt our thirty-first-century descendants will be equally scathing about the primitive nature of our own technology and ideas. A remote period may be of great historical significance, even though it lacks smoking factories or good dentistry, and the central Middle Ages were formative both in European and world history; its consequences still have profound resonances today.
The following set of essays is intended to introduce the history of Europe between c.950 and c.1320. Five of the six chapters below Consider the nature of western European civilization from political, social, economic, religious, and intellectual perspectives, and the sixth chapter shows how this culture expanded into northern, east-central, and southernmost Europe, and attempted to incorporate parts of south-east Europe, the North African coast, and the Near East as well. All six essays emphasize that medieval society was far from static. The period of nearly four centuries discussed in this volume is a long time even for a premodern, ‘traditional’ society; and medieval Europe altered almost out of recognition between the mid-tenth and the early fourteenth centuries. This introductory chapter will explain why the period may be considered a distinctive era, which English-speaking historians frequently describe as the ‘central Middle Ages’. It will then describe medieval Europe’s main geographical limitations as well as its political and cultural divisions, and introduce some of the ways in which historians have attempted to sum up and explain the great changes of the period.
World History
