While the natural environment is an important consideration for understanding the course of central medieval history, so, too, were the continent’s major cultural divisions. In the tenth century Europe was divided between four main religious blocs: Latin Christianity (Roman Catholicism), Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and paganism. In the West most of the population were ‘Latin’ Christians who recognized the religious authority of the pope, at least in name. Greek and other Eastern Orthodox inhabited the Balkans as well as some adjacent parts of the Near East, and from the late tenth century Rus’ (approximating to modern European Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine) was being converted to the Orthodox Church as well. The Latin and Greek Orthodox churches were not formally divided by a schism* until 1054, but, although there were few doctrinal differences between them, they had long since grown apart in matters of religious practice. Nevertheless, whereas ‘Europe’ was rarely anything more than a geographical expression, ‘Christendom’ represented a genuine community: the defence of eastern Christians inspired warriors from as far away as Denmark and Scotland to journey to Palestine during the crusades.
It is important to remember that Europe also had significant groups of non-Christians. In the north-east and far north of the continent the majority of the population in the tenth century were pagans of various sorts, and paganism persisted in some regions until the end of the Middle Ages, particularly in Lithuania, which covered a much larger area than the modern Baltic republic of that name. In 950 most of the Iberian peninsula and many of the Mediterranean islands had Islamic rulers, and the majority of the populations of these regions were Muslims. Although Islam had begun to retreat from the high-watermark of its expansion into south-west Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, it was still prominent as far north as Provence, where a group of ‘Saracens’ terrorized the Alpine passes until local Christians expelled them in c.972. As Muslim power gave ground in western Europe over the next three centuries, new Christian kingdoms emerged in its wake. Nevertheless, there were several major revivals in Spain of Muslim power, which was still far from negligible in 1300; the lands conquered by Christians also usually retained Muslim inhabitants. Finally, across much of the continent were scattered Jewish communities, whose distribution and size would vary enormously in the course of the period (see Chapter 4).
The expansion of Latin Christendom, described by Nora Berend in Chapter 6, meant that Latin relations with the Eastern Orthodox, Muslim, and pagan powers worsened almost everywhere; by the early fourteenth century most of the northern pagan tribes had vanished from the map and the Jews were being expelled from much of western Europe. Latin Christians also developed a stronger sense of non-Christians as the ‘Other’ against which they identified themselves. In a cycle of Old French poems that relate the deeds of the semi-mythical hero William of Orange, his Muslim enemies are sometimes called ‘Slavs’.1 Perhaps these texts preserved a dim memory of the Slavonic slaves who had fought in early medieval Spanish Muslim armies; it is equally possible, however, that they were fusing the non-Christians of the Mediterranean (the Muslims) and those of north-central Europe (pagan Slavs), for were they not all the enemies of Christ? In the twelfth century Latin Christian armies in the Baltic regions justified their aggression against pagans in terms derived from the crusades to Jerusalem (see pp. 193, 205-6).
Another of the great cultural demarcators was language. Europe has several main linguistic groups; then as now the Romance, Germanic, and Slavonic languages, which all belong to the Indo-European ‘family’, were predominant. Romance, derived primarily from Latin, included not only the precursors of modern French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian, but also Occitan (less accurately called Provencal), the chief language of southern France that in the twelfth century served the flourishing ‘troubadour’* culture. Germanic languages extended from Old (later Middle) English in the British Isles to Middle High German in southern Germany and Austria; they also included the Scandinavian languages, which at the height of Viking power were spoken from Greenland to Kiev, although they retreated thereafter. German spread through migration into east-central Europe, while French warriors exported Old French to the British Isles, Sicily, Greece, and Palestine. Slavonic languages retreated from eastern Germany, but otherwise their range remained remarkably static: linguists customarily divide them into western Slavonic (nowadays including Polish, Czech, and Slovak), southern (the languages of Bulgaria and Former Yugoslavia), and eastern (which now includes Russian and Ukrainian). In addition, the Celtic tongues in the British Isles and Brittany, Basque in northern Spain and south-west France, and the Baltic languages represented by modern Latvian and Lithuanian were all more widespread than today. Magyar or Hungarian formed (and forms) a ‘Finno-Ugric’ island in an ocean of Indo-European languages, with which it has no affinities. Further south, medieval Greek was one of the main languages of southern Italy, Turkey, and Syria.
In most modern European nations, language is the single most important determinant of identity. In the Middle Ages, in contrast, bilingualism was part and parcel of ordinary life for many of Europe’s inhabitants, and the political repercussions of language were often far from straightforward. In 1295 King Edward I of England accused the French (in a letter written in Latin) of wishing to destroy the ‘English language’, meaning the English people; but the Anglo-Norman dialect of French was then the dominant language of the English court.2 At the thirteenth-century Bohemian court, Czech, German, and Latin literature all flourished. The most significant linguistic divide was between the vernacular of ordinary people and Latin, the chief language of learning and of power. Knowledge of Latin in western Christendom was never confined to clerks, and it is now recognized that early medieval lay elites made much use of Latin; nevertheless, one of the main developments of the central Middle Ages was the growth of the educated laity who knew and used this far from dead language in everyday affairs. Moreover, outside the British Isles vernacular tongues had hitherto been primarily oral across Latin Europe, but from the twelfth century onwards writing in the vernacular became ever more possible and popular (see Chapter 5).
Modern science has discredited the notion of ‘race’, but medieval writers usually worked on the assumption that the peoples of Europe were distinct, and to each one they attributed a distinguished ancestor in antiquity. The myths and legends that developed may seem laughable to a modern audience: by 1200 the French, Danes, and Welsh amongst others were all claiming Trojan ancestry, while the Scots began to allege that they were descended from a daughter of Pharaoh called Scota. What these stories attested was not the inherent gullibility of medieval authors—plenty of writers treated the more outlandish origin myths with scepticism or disdain—but a desire to prove the antiquity of one’s ‘people’ (natio or gens) and use this ‘history’ to foster political unity. When the diverse origins of a gens could not be ignored, it could still be turned to advantage: in the 1050s a monastic historian at the abbey of Saint-Wandrille near Rouen commented that Rollo, the Viking whom tradition regarded as having founded the duchy of Normandy in 911, ‘united in a short time men of all origins and different occupations.. . and from the different races he made one people’. This statement was evidently meant to allay anxieties amongst the Normans about their mixed Scandinavian and Frankish origins.3
Such tales of national origins were not intended only for drinking halls or monastic scriptoria*. In 1301 a letter of Edward I to the pope justified his claim to lordship over Scotland by describing the exploits of Trojan refugees who had divided Britain between them, the most senior receiving England with royal authority over the whole island.4 Did Edward know, and did it matter, that most of this account had been invented in the twelfth century by the author Geoffrey of Monmouth? The famous Scottish rebuttal of English claims to overlordship, the Declaration of Arbroath (1320), stated that the ancient Scots had ‘journeyed from Greater Scythia [modern Ukraine] by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea [in the western Mediterranean] and the Pillars of Hercules [Straits of Gibraltar], and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes’. Scottish unity in the face of external threat is instructive because the Scots were a particularly heterogeneous people, formed from the fusion of Gaelic, Pictish, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, British (Welsh), French, and Flemish elements. Origin myths were no less powerful in the opening years of the fourteenth century than in the tenth; if anything, the spread of learning and literacy encouraged their elaboration.
For the sake of convenience historians may refer to ‘French’, ‘German’, ‘Italian’, or ‘Spanish’ and talk of kingdoms as political entities, but, as Bjorn Weiler notes in Chapter 3, the nature of communications and political organization meant that regional and local identities often counted for far more than allegiance to a distant monarch or abstract concepts of regnal solidarity. Bishop Liudprand of Cremona, on an embassy from the western Emperor Otto I to the Byzantine emperor in 968, described Otto’s subjects as ‘we Lombards, Saxons, Franks, Lotharingians, Bavarians, Swabians and Burgundians’.8 Deep-seated regional sentiment would remain an abiding theme in the history of the western Empire, where it was both a force for local cohesion and an obstacle to many emperors’ designs. The peoples of the kingdom of France might all acknowledge the authority of the Capetian kings by 1300, but preferred to define themselves as Poitevins, Angevins, Normans, and so on: ‘French’ usually denoted only the inhabitants of the region around Paris. Perhaps most striking of all was the fierce loyalty that developed amongst Italians towards their minuscule city states. ‘Among all the regions of the earth, universal fame extols, distinguishes and places first Lombardy [the North Italian plain],’ wrote Bonvesin de la Riva, an inhabitant of Milan, in 1288, ‘and among the cities of Lombardy, it distinguishes Milan as the rose or lily among flowers.. . the lion among quadrupeds and the eagle amongst birds’.9
World History
