If the world known to tenth-century Europeans was divided into four main religious zones, it was far more fragmented in political terms. No regime then inspired greater awe in Christendom than the Byzantine Empire. As the heirs of the eastern half of the great Roman Empire of antiquity, the Byzantines usually thought of themselves as Romans, although their empire was far more Greek than Latin in character. Under Justinian I (527-65), whose legal codes later formed
8 Liudprand of Cremona, The Embassy to Constantinople and Other Writings, trans. F. A. Wright, ed. J. J. Norwich (London, 1993), 183.
9 Bonvesin de la Riva, in The Towns of Italy in the Later Middle Ages, trans. T. Dean (Manchester, 2000), 11.
The basis of ‘Roman’ law in the West, the empire had extended from southern Spain to Mesopotamia, but vicious maulings by the Lombards, Persians, Arabs, and Bulgars had greatly reduced it in size and power. In the mid-tenth century Byzantine and Arab power rubbed shoulders in an uneasy equilibrium along the eastern fringes of Anatolia (modern Asiatic Turkey), as they had done for over two centuries.
The central Middle Ages would be an era of repeated catastrophe for the Byzantine Empire, but its opening decades actually witnessed significant Byzantine expansion in the Balkans, Armenia, and in the Mediterranean from southern Italy to Syria. In the mid-eleventh and the late twelfth centuries, however, it underwent two periods of sustained internal rupture, marked by provincial revolts and recurrent usurpations of the imperial throne. In the 1070s and 1080s the Seljuk Turks overran most of Anatolia, hitherto the heart of the empire. Meanwhile, ‘Franks’ from western Europe repeatedly troubled the Byzantines, expelling them from Italy and attempting to conquer parts of the Balkans and Greece. In 1204, a Frankish crusading army captured Constantinople itself, and its leaders parcelled out the empire amongst themselves: for two generations a ‘Latin’ emperor sat on the imperial throne. Although the Greeks of Nicaea eventually expelled the Latins in 1261, irreparable damage had been done to this ancient and venerable state.
To the Byzantines the territorial extent of their empire mattered less than their view of themselves. This is how the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena, writing in the 1140s, envisaged her ‘Roman’ world: ‘There was a time when the frontiers of Roman power were the two pillars at the limits of east and west—the so-called Pillars of Hercules in the west and those of Dionysos not far from the Indian border in the east. As far as its extent was concerned, it is impossible to say how great was the power of Rome.’5 Anna’s description conveys the Byzantines’ consciously unchanging view of themselves as the true heirs of ancient Rome. For the same reason, she frequently referred to the Franks, as the inhabitants of western Europe, as ‘Celts’. Two generations later, the Byzantine official Niketas Choniates dismissed the crusaders whom he witnessed sacking Constantinople in 1204 as ‘beef-eating Latins’.11 Such defiant self-confidence helps to explain the respect that the ‘Celts’ still paid to the Empire in the twelfth century. One of those same ‘beef-eating’ conquerors of Constantinople marvelled at the city’s wealth shortly before its capture: ‘Many of our men, I may say, went to visit Constantinople, to gaze at its many splendid palaces and tall churches, and view all the marvellous wealth of a city richer than any other since the beginning of Time. As for the relics, these were beyond all description; for there were at that time as many in Constantinople as in all the rest of the world.’12
The Byzantine Empire was not the only power that claimed to be the heir of ancient Rome. In 800 the pope had awarded the imperial title to Charles the Great (Charlemagne), king of the Franks and Lombards, the most powerful man in the West. This event was the culmination of over 400 years of integration of the Germanic and Roman heritage of western Europe. This Carolingian Empire included modern France, the Low Countries, western Germany, Switzerland, Austria, most of Italy, and north-east Spain. By 888 Charlemagne’s warring descendants had irrevocably shattered the unity of his empire, but the imperial ideal lived on, as Otto I’s coronation as emperor demonstrates. Smaller in extent but equal in pretension to its Carolingian predecessor (see Map 3), Otto’s empire was destined to last in one form or another until 1806; historians usually refer to it as the Holy Roman Empire from the twelfth or thirteenth century.
Although the Empire comprised only the kingdoms of Germany, Italy, and (from 1032) Burgundy, to the biographer of Frederick I Barbarossa (1152-90) the imperial crown conferred ‘sole rule over the world and the City [of Rome]’ (orbis et urbis), and far away in Normandy a monk referred around 1200 to Otto IV’s throne as ‘empire of the whole world’.13 It was believed that an emperor would play a role in the apocalyptic events at the end of Time: since the Prophet Daniel had foretold that there would be four empires in human history, and scholars had calculated that Rome must be the
“ O City of Byzantium: Annals of Niketas Choniates, trans. H. J. Magoulias (Detroit, 1984), 326.
12 Geoffrey de Villehardouin, ‘The Conquest of Constantinople’, Joinville and Ville-hardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. M. R. B. Shaw (Harmondsworth, 1963), 76.
13 Otto of Freising, The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, trans. C. C. Mierow (New York, 1953), 135; Les Annales de l’Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Jumieges, ed. J. Laporte (Rouen, 1954), 77.
Fourth and last, did not Scripture (reinforced by late Classical and early medieval prophetic texts) ordain that the Roman emperor would be the final ruler on earth? Yet even the strongest emperors could appear weak in much of the Empire. In 1155, when Frederick Barbarossa went to Italy, an integral part of his empire, he had to fight his way down to Rome, was crowned emperor by the pope in the teeth of the citizens’ armed opposition, then beat a hasty retreat northwards. Frederick’s subsequent attempts to control Italy met with greater success, but he was defeated by a league of Italian cities in 1176, and few other emperors matched his power. The Empire comprised a patchwork of duchies, counties, lordships (both lay and ecclesiastical), and fiercely autonomous cities; even as the emperors pursued their goals of universal rule, the princes were consolidating their rule over their territories within the Empire. Imperial power and authority likewise tended to be at their strongest in the regions of the emperors’ hereditary domains: for the Ottonian dynasty (9621002), this meant in Saxony in northern Germany; for the Salians (1024-1125), the middle Rhineland around Worms and Speyer, while Frederick Barbarossa’s Hohenstaufen dynasty (1138-1254) had its greatest concentration of estates in Swabia in south-west Germany and in Alsace (now in eastern France).
The other main successor to the Carolingian Empire was the kingdom of the West Franks, which evolved into the kingdom of France. At the outset of our period, it notionally included most of the modern French Republic apart from the regions east of the Rivers Rhone, Saone, and Meuse. In reality, its kings exerted less influence in much of the kingdom than magnates or local lords. One of the most significant developments of the period was the growth of French monarchical power, aided by the misfortunes or folly of many of these great subjects, by quite remarkable dynastic community, and by the growing prosperity of its main powerbase, the Paris Basin. In addition the intellectual currents of the period heightened respect for kingship, as scholastic theories of the organization of society emphasized the place of the monarch at its head, and the revival of Roman Law popularized the maxim that the ruler’s will had the force of law. The chief obstacle to the monarchy’s rise was the power of the territorial princes, notably the kings of England, who became dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine and counts of Anjou (see below, pp. 19-20). By 1214, however, the Capetian kings had established their hegemony within northern and central France. Throughout the period the kings of France also periodically attempted to make their presence felt in the vast Occitan-speaking southern regions of their kingdom, and when the so-called Albigensian Crusade (1209-29) against the Cathar heretics shattered local power structures, the Capetian kings intruded themselves into the vacuum.
Given their competing claims to be the heirs of the immortalized figure of Charlemagne, the kings of France and the Emperors might be expected to have been in constant rivalry. In fact, the reverse was true, precisely because neither monarchy wielded a great deal of influence along their common borders, where a vast buffer zone dominated by dukes, marquises, and counts extended from the Netherlands to Provence. Indeed, across the whole of Latin Christendom, the power of the nobility was vast and, as Martin Aurell shows below (pp. 37-40), it developed and refined a distinctive ethos during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The contrast between monarch and nobles should not be drawn too sharply. They shared a similar desire to promote their dynasties; royal and noble families constantly intermarried, and the great noble families regularly supplied monarchs when royal lines failed. Conversely, many of the great noble families were descended from junior branches of royal houses.
The kingdom of England was a novel creation in the mid-tenth century, emerging from the kingdom of Wessex (south-west England). In 950 the British Isles were largely subsumed into the North Sea world of the Northmen or Vikings from Scandinavia. Until 954 there was a Viking king at York; in 1014, King Swein of the Danes conquered the whole of England, and his son Cnut III the Great (1016-35) ruled over an empire that included Denmark, England, and Norway. Yet, despite this Scandinavian influence, for most of the central Middle Ages England was dominated by French, not Danish culture. In 1066 the duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror, famously conquered England and had himself crowned king. Over the next 150 years nobles, knights, merchants, and clerics exported northern French culture across the Channel, while the kings of England tried to balance their monarchical duties in England with princely aspirations in France (although they never aimed for the French crown itself). From 1154 to 1204 the ‘Angevin’* or ‘Plantagenet’ kings of England ruled a motley collection of provinces known to historians as the ‘Angevin Empire’. Its rulers struggled to make their authority respected in much of this territory, particularly south of the River Loire; eventually, internal dissensions enabled Philip Augustus of France to add Anjou, Maine, Normandy, and much of Poitou to his domain between 1202 and 1204. Successive kings of France worked hard to erode the surviving Angevin possessions in Aquitaine; by 1328 these comprised little more than a small coastal strip in Gascony.
Other parts of the British Isles felt the consequences of the Norman Conquest of England. Neither Wales nor Ireland had previously achieved political unity, although rulers such as Brian Boruma (or Boru, d. 1014) in Ireland and Gruffydd ap Llywelyn (d. 1063) in Wales had achieved temporary hegemony. Soon after 1066 the Norman invaders of England began making inroads into Wales, although some Welsh princes successfully resisted Anglo-Norman power until the 1280s. In 1169 Anglo-Norman adventurers entered Ireland, initially as mercenaries but soon as conquerors, and the king of England soon followed. After a high point in the mid-thirteenth century, English fortunes in Ireland began to decline in the face of resurgent Gaelic power. The Scots, meanwhile, quickly established peaceable relations with the Normans of England, many of whom migrated to Scotland at the behest of its kings.
The other Latin Christian kingdoms outside the former Carolingian lands are discussed in Chapter 6. They include the Scandinavian kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; in east-central Europe, the realms of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia; and, in the Mediterranean, numerous new polities formed at the expense of the Muslims and Byzantines. The Iberian peninsula underwent the greatest political transformation of any region in Europe. In the tenth century it mostly lay under the rule of the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate based at Cordoba, the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan culture in western Europe. Although there were many Christians under Muslim rule, known as ‘Mozarabs’ (literally the ‘Arabized’), independent Christian powers were confined to the northern fringes of the peninsula. After the disintegration of the Caliphate in 1031, al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) contracted in the face of Christian advances. Further east, the Muslim retreat also enabled the establishment of the kingdom of Sicily in 1130, which survived in some form until the unification of Italy in 1860. Placed at the nodal point of Mediterranean communications, it became the hub of a series of dynastic rivalries that drew in the Holy Roman Emperors, the kings of France and Aragon and the papacy. More transient were the new kingdoms and principalities in the eastern Mediterranean founded in the wake of the Crusades; only the island states such as the kingdom of Cyprus (founded 1191-2) and the Venetian and Genoese acquisitions such as Crete proved longlasting.
The borders of kingdoms mattered, but we should not assume that they were sovereign in any modern sense of the term. Kings of one kingdom might be active in another on account of their dynastic lands: at various times the kings of England, Aragon, Navarre, and Castile all had lands and rights in France, for instance. In any case, monarchy was far from the only form of political organization: city communes, principalities, ecclesiastical lordships, and semiindependent castellanies all had a crucial role to play. The central Middle Ages were not a period of monarchy so much as an age in which monarchy began to prevail over these other polities (except in the Holy Roman Empire). Even so, with no standing army or police except bands of household knights, most rulers remained reliant upon the aristocracy for military support--the alternative of mercenaries, paid for through taxation, had a high financial and political cost--and so noble power remained deeply entrenched in 1320 as in 950. This reliance meant that the norm for royal-noble relations was not conflict but cooperation, which was reinforced through political rituals that are vividly characterized by Bjorn Weiler in Chapter 3.
In addition to the continent’s temporal rulers, the Church was of immeasurable significance to European society throughout the central Middle Ages, when its power and authority were transformed out of all recognition. The tenth century was possibly the nadir of the papacy’s fortunes; like most bishoprics of the time, it was controlled by local nobles, notably the Roman senatrix Marozia and her family, and several popes were even deposed and murdered. Between the 1040s and the mid-thirteenth century, however, the papacy rose from relative feebleness to the moral leadership of Christendom, with ambitions even to depose emperors and with influence over the daily lives of all Catholics. Yet the transformation of the Church reached far beyond the papacy; as Julia Barrow shows in Chapter 4, it mobilized the whole populace. The parish system was already developing long before 950, but only in the central Middle Ages did it become comprehensive. The physical fabric of the institutional
Church, its cathedrals and parish churches, was established across most of Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
It would be a mistake to assume that the Church was a monolithic institution: so vast and diverse an organization was bound to be brimming with competing interests and rivalries. The archdeacon Walter Map, who frequented the late-twelfth-century English court, had caustic words for religious orders, observing that ‘Monks recognize their prey as the hawk spies the frightened lark’.14 Conversely, the numerous conflicts between individual European rulers and the papacy or local prelates should not mask the fact that rulers normally cooperated closely with their bishops and clergy. Although the hierarchy professed to speak on behalf of everyone, all Christians were ‘sons of the Holy Mother Church’. To be outside this community, as heretics and excommunicates, Muslims, Jews, and pagans were, was increasingly to be an outcast who might be tolerated but was rarely trusted. By tightening its definitions of orthodox belief and creating a system of ecclesiastical courts and canon law, the Church made exclusion of dissenters both more likely and more terrible, although temporal rulers jealously guarded their monopoly of the death penalty in heresy trials.
World History
