All historical periodization has an element of arbitrariness, but the division into ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’, and ‘modern’ has proved the most enduring scheme of all for analysing European history. Of course, the peoples of eleventh-century or thirteenth-century Europe cannot have known that they inhabited the ‘Middle Ages’ (in Latin medium aevum, from which the word ‘medieval’ was coined in the eighteenth century). That concept was invented by the thinkers of the so-called Renaissance, influenced by the fourteenth-century Italian poet and humanist* Petrarch (1304-74). The Renaissance scholars came to the conclusion that they were separated by a ‘dark’ or ‘middle’ age from a glorious Classical past, the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Although refined and refashioned, this view of the Middle Ages has proved remarkably durable. Before and after the French Revolution, it became a weapon with which the critics of Europe’s anciens regimes could denounce its monarchies and the Roman Catholic Church. Hugely influential works as diverse as Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848), and Jakob Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the
Renaissance in Italy (i860) all reinforced the view of the Middle Ages as an undifferentiated era of ignorance, superstition, and political and religious oppression.
With the emergence of a more specialized historical profession, however, the notion of a single ‘Middle Age’ between 500 and 1500 has come to seem an overgeneralization of magnificent proportions. Since the late nineteenth century historians have sought various ways of subdividing those ten centuries. German historians, generally followed by their English-speaking counterparts, have tended to differentiate between the Fruh-, Hoch-, and Spatmittelalter, or ‘early’, ‘high’, and ‘late’ Middle Age(s). In contrast, historians in Romancespeaking countries prefer to distinguish between the ‘high’ (early) and ‘low’ (late) Middle Ages (in French, for instance, haut and bas Moyen-Age). Hence, although in English usage ‘high Middle Ages’ usually corresponds to the period covered by the present book, in the context of continental historiography it is a very ambiguous phrase. The current volume follows standard Anglo-American practice in dividing the Middle Ages into three, but has adopted a well-established alternative phrase, ‘central Middle Ages’, for the middle period, in order to avoid any confusion.
There are several reasons why the history of Europe from the mid-tenth to the early fourteenth centuries may be regarded as a defined period. First, at the outset western Europe emerged from a period of sustained pressure from neighbouring peoples. Since the 790s the coastlines of the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean had been subject to periodic Viking raids from Scandinavia, and the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea had long suffered comparable attacks from Muslim fleets. Already intermittently assaulted from the north, west, and south, from the 890s onwards western Europe faced a new threat from the east. From the Eurasian steppes, so often a source of nomadic invasions of Europe, the Magyars migrated into the Hungarian plain, from where they launched raids far and wide across the continent. However, for a variety of reasons, most of these raids subsided after 950, although the British Isles experienced further bursts of Scandinavian activity between the 980s and 1070. It is true that relations between early medieval Christians and their neighbours before 950 were by no means always hostile, and the assaults themselves had some positive effects; it is also true that occasional external assaults were rarely as disruptive as strife amongst
Christians. Nevertheless, the late tenth century marks the beginning of a new phase in European history, since Latin Christendom ceased to be on the defensive against neighbouring cultures and began to expand aggressively against them.
Secondly, Latin territorial expansion was accompanied by a demographic and economic transformation, vastly increasing the continent’s population, number of settlements, and cultivated land. The tenth and eleventh centuries also witnessed some radical changes to settlement patterns, often through aristocratic direction, which transformed the social and economic structures of the countryside (see below, pp. 22-5, and Chapter 1). Conversely, by the late thirteenth century the demographic expansion was faltering, and by the 1320s, after a series of famines and livestock plagues, the population of western Europe may even have been in decline; soon after it was devastated by the Black Death (1347-51) (see Conclusion).
Thirdly, the second half of the tenth century witnessed several events that recast the framework of western European politics for several centuries. Since the eighth century, much of the European continent had been dominated by the Frankish or ‘Carolingian’ Empire, but by the mid-tenth century it had effectively disintegrated: in its stead its central and eastern territories were being welded into an ‘Ottonian empire’ (from which the better-known Holy Roman Empire would later emerge), an event marked by the coronation of Otto I, king of the east Franks (933-72), as emperor in 962. Meanwhile, in 987 the Carolingians were formally replaced by the Capetian dynasty in the kingdom of the West Franks (or France); and, quite independently, the unification of the kingdom of England under the kings of the West Saxons was achieved in the 950s. At the same time, however, the leading noble dynasties of western Europe were increasingly rooting themselves in particular regions, thereby laying the foundations of the patchwork of duchies, counties, and lordships that would form many of the chief building blocks of European politics until the French Revolutionary wars of the 1790s. The end of the period was also marked by several major political developments, notably the beginning of chronic conflict between several of the western European monarchies and crises for the two ‘universalist’ powers in the continent, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy (see Conclusion).
So the period covered by this book may be regarded as a single era, differentiated from the early and late Middle Ages by political, economic, and social conditions. The periodization is most appropriate from a western European perspective, since population increase and the reclamation of marginal land continued apace in eastern Europe in the fourteenth century, when they had largely ceased in the West. Yet the virtual end to the expansion of Latin Christendom in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries affected the whole continent and the adjacent parts of the Near East.
This periodization inevitably has its limitations. Romance-speaking historians have generally preferred a twofold Middle Ages because of certain profound changes that occurred midway through the period covered by this book, between c. io6o and c.1230. The significance of this ‘long twelfth century’ will be apparent in most of the following chapters. Many of the most important political changes discussed by Bjorn Weiler (Chapter 3) were concentrated in this shorter period, including the rise of accountable government and of extraordinary taxation, and a growing shift from oral customary law to written law proclaimed through princely ordinances; the period also witnessed the spread of the influence of Roman Law upon notions of rulership. Martin Aurell’s survey of western European society (Chapter 1) shows how these institutional changes contributed to the hardening of social divisions, in particular the reinforcement of the status of the nobles precisely when the weakening of manorial structures were undermining seigneurial controls over their peasants—a trend discussed by David Nicholas (Chapter 2), who emphasizes the qualitative shift in the European economy either side of the year 1180.
The ‘long twelfth century’ was also the most important phase in the transformation of the Roman Church, often dubbed the ‘reform movement’ by historians (discussed in Chapter 4 by Julia Barrow), which now enforced much tighter moral control over both clergy and laity and embarked upon a heightened search for religious order and orthodoxy. This political and religious revolution is marked by the crusaders’ capture of Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1099 and of Constantinople from the (Greek Christian) Byzantine Empire in 1204; the codification of canon law in Gratian’s Decretum (c.1140), of feudal law in the Italian Libri Feudorum (late twelfth century), and the justification of temporal power by John of Salisbury in his Policraticus (1159). The emergence of universities at Bologna, Salerno, Paris, Montpellier, and Oxford formed part of a new intellectual flourishing often now called the ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’. As Anna Sapir Abulafia (Chapter 5) remarks, many scholars in this period sensed that they were living in a new age.
The mid-twelfth century also witnessed what has traditionally been regarded as one of the most fundamental shifts in the history of architecture (although nowadays architectural historians tend to be more cautious), as heavier Romanesque traditions began to be superseded by lighter and more graceful Gothic forms. Lester K. Little has even taken this change as emblematic of an entire shift in Christian culture:1 what he calls ‘Romanesque’ Christianity, informal in character and dominated by Benedictine monasticism and liturgy, was superseded by a far more regulated ‘Gothic’ Christianity; the dynamic forces within Christianity were no longer Benedictine monks but the church hierarchy (the pope, bishops, priests, and diocesan officials such as archdeacons), new religious orders, and the universities. Karl Leyser described the transformation of the Roman Catholic Church as the ‘first European revolution’; comparing European society to other Eurasian cultures of the same period, R. I. Moore has used the same phrase for the whole set of social, economic, religious, and political developments in western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.2 Hence the ‘long twelfth century’ marks a significant shift within European (particularly western European) history, yet, like one Russian doll inside another, it also fits into a much broader age of demographic, social, and religious expansion that we know as the central Middle Ages.
World History
