Let us begin by contemplating the political map of the medieval West (see Introduction). In 900, few of the political entities with which we are familiar from the later medieval or the modern period existed. There was no kingdom of France as such (although there was, of course, a Gallia and a Francia), and no Holy Roman Empire, but rather an ill-defined imperium, divided among the descendants of Charlemagne, but still ruled by them. In Iberia, the Christian polities were largely confined to an inhospitable stretch of land north of the River Ebro, while in Italy Franks, Lombards, Muslims, and Byzantines
This chapter owes much to the outline that Timothy Reuter devised for it before his death. (B. W.)
Vied for political control. In England, the hegemony recently established by the house of Wessex under Alfred the Great (871-99) came under threat by internal dynastic squabbles, and Danish and Viking invasions. As for Scotland, Wales, or Ireland, Scandinavia or central Europe, the evidence remains too fragmentary to reach any clear understanding of what their political organization may have been like.
Four hundred years later, this map had changed beyond recognition. Charlemagne’s empire had disappeared. New polities emerged: the kingdom of Portugal was established in 1139, and that of Sicily in 1130. Stephen, on converting to Christianity, also assumed the title of a king of Hungary in 1000 (see Chapter 6), and in 1318 the duke of Poland was made a king by Pope John XXII. In other regions of medieval Europe kings had been able to stabilize their power and drive out princely rivals—as perhaps best exemplified by the case of the Canmore dynasty in Scotland, which between the eleventh and the thirteenth century subdued not only its western neighbours in Galloway, but also expanded into the distant north and the formerly Norse regions of the Orkneys and the Western Isles. A similar process of consolidation occurred in Scandinavia from the tenth century onwards (see Chapter 6). The core of the Carolingian imperium experienced a similar transformation. By 1225 much of West Francia came under the control of the Capetian monarchy, established in 987, which, from the late twelfth century onwards, entered a period of unprecedented territorial expansion, both within the borders of its kingdom, and against its neighbours, and which had become the dominant political force in western Europe by the end of our period. The rulers of East Francia, on the other hand, had taken over the mantle of imperial lordship and presided over a loosely structured ‘Holy Roman Empire’, which encompassed the modern countries of Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, parts of eastern France, and most of northern Italy, and which stretched from Hamburg to Pisa, from Lyon to Prague.
These kingdoms clearly were not ‘nation states’ in any modern sense. There were polities such as Sicily, with Norman French, German, Byzantine, North African, and Italian elites and subjects, or England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, which combined a Norman royal dynasty with Flemish, Breton, Manceau, and Angevin nobles, ruling over an Anglo-Saxon subject population. In others, ethnicity was less of a defining issue than religious affiliation, as, for instance, in the kingdoms of Iberia with their large Muslim population, or in Hungary, where the Arpad dynasty ruled over Christians, Jews, Muslims, and pagans. This also applied to the core of western Europe, and the Capetian kings of France, for instance, faced a situation in which their subjects in the south viewed those in the north as aliens, where they spoke different languages and followed different legal and political customs. Similarly, in the German heartlands of the Holy Roman Empire, regional aristocracies viewed each other suspiciously. In 1073, for instance, the decision of Emperor Henry IV to man his castles in Saxony with knights from Swabia was one of the factors contributing to the Saxon uprising that nearly cost him his throne. People frequently defined their communal identity in terms of regional rather than regnal or national affiliation.
Moreover, individual Europeans could belong to a variety of networks that superseded such modern constructs as the nation. These could include trading links, like those that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought about permanent English colonies in Valencia or Cologne; and institutional affiliations—after all, many monastic houses had a variety of bonds with those in other kingdoms, with some religious orders, like the Cistercians, very much priding themselves on their transregnal nature—and ecclesiastical structures: Saint Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury (1093-1109), had previously been abbot of Bec in Normandy, but had been born and brought up in Aosta in Lombardy, while Bishop (Saint) Hugh of Lincoln (c.1140-1200) originated from Burgundy. Equally, members of the aristocracy could be active across the borders of several kingdoms. In the thirteenth century, the Montfort family (from Montfort-l’Amaury near Paris) was active in the kingdom of Jerusalem, in Cyprus, Italy, northern and southern France, and England, and the counts of Savoy held important positions in Burgundy, Italy, and Germany, while also being related to successive popes and emperors, as well as the kings of England, France, and Sicily. Kingdoms and regnal identities existed, as we will see, but they formed part of a complex web of affiliations and communities, and defy categorization along modern concepts of statehood or nationhood.
This gradually began to change near the end of our period, and perhaps most famously in the case of England, where, in 1258, the English barons rebelled against their king and demanded that he draw his advisers and officials from among the homines naturales, the natives of England. At the same time, the fact that this movement was led by Simon de Montfort (d. 1265), a Frenchman, should warn us against viewing these events from too modern a perspective. The English barons did not invoke a feeling of English ethnic identity, but sought to impose limits upon the degree to which the king could draw on those from outside the ruling elite in running the kingdom. The aliens in question were not foreigners per se, but the king’s Poitevin and Savoyard relatives, and the homines naturales the descendants of French warriors who had shared in the process of conquest and colonization since 1066. We encounter a more familiar phenomenon in the case of Bohemia and parts of North Wales, where issues of language and cultural tradition led to a more clear-cut definition of ethnic identity. The princes of Gwynedd sought to subdue their Welsh rivals by claiming that they alone could maintain the independence of Pura Wallia, of Welsh Wales—defined by its language and legal traditions—against the king of England, while in Bohemia the respective roles of the king’s German and Czech subjects became the subject of heated debate in the early fourteenth century.
Finally, kingdoms and principalities emerged and disappeared again. In 1016, for example, England had been absorbed into a Scandinavian empire straddling the North Sea, while, near the end of our period, Scotland nearly ceased to exist as an autonomous political entity when, in 1296, King Edward I (1272-1307) incorporated it into the realm of England. It was not until the 1320s that the realm of Scotland gained international recognition again when Pope John XXII recognized the kingship of Robert Bruce (1306-29). Similarly, territories could be divided among a ruler’s relations, as in the late twelfth century, when Henry II (1154-89), contemplated dividing England (with Normandy and Anjou), Aquitaine, Brittany, and Ireland among his sons. In his testament of 1250, Emperor Frederick II planned to share his possessions in the empire, Sicily, Jerusalem, and Burgundy among his sons. In twelfth-century Iberia, kingdoms such as Aragon, Leon, and Castile merged and re-emerged following marriages, succession disputes, and rebellions, while few of the colonial polities established in the Eastern Mediterranean during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--such as the kingdom of Jerusalem, or the duchy of Athens—lasted for more than a century.
Alongside all this, concepts of imperial lordship, as a secular institution standing alongside the papacy and with similar claims to universal authority, while experiencing a renaissance in political thought by the end of our period, began to decline as an organizing model in practice. While in the tenth and eleventh centuries emperors might have exercised a sort of hegemony across the West, this rarely translated into a claim to exercising actual political power over other kings—unless they shared a border with the Empire—and was often a matter first and foremost of prestige and standing. Both King Cnut and William the Conqueror sought imperial backing for their conquests of England (Cnut by attending an imperial coronation, and William by dispatching an embassy), but neither viewed this as essential for the legitimacy of their conquest. It heightened the moral authority of their action, but was neither a legal nor a political requirement. This began to change from the late eleventh century onwards, and one factor in this process was the increasingly awkward relationship between Holy Roman emperors and the papacy. After all, of eleven emperors and emperor-elects who ruled between 1056 and 1245 only two—Lothar III (1125-37) and Henry VI (1190-7)—were not excommunicated at some stage of their reign, while popes even declared Henry IV (1056-1106) and Frederick II (1194/7-1250) deposed, in 1076 and 1245 respectively. From the mid-eleventh century onwards, successive popes began to define the liberty of the Church ever more widely, and opposition against lay influence on ecclesiastical matters began to extend from hostility towards local and regional potentates to include that of kings and even emperors. One of the key principles that had underpinned the rebirth of empire in the ninth and tenth centuries—that of the emperor as protector and guardian of the Holy See—was being called into question. Another contributing element was the emergence of new political entities that had never been part of the Carolingian imperium, such as Portugal, Poland, Bohemia, or Scotland, as well as the arrival on the European political scene of dynasties and peoples, such as the Normans in France, Sicily, Syria, and England. It was in these regions, too, that short-lived attempts were made to adopt an imperial title, as by the kings of Wessex in the tenth century and the kings of Castile in the twelfth. However, unlike under the Carolingians and their East Frankish or German successors, this imperial lordship did not define itself as succession to the Roman Empire of Augustus or Constantine, but as lordship over several kings or kingdoms (the other Anglo-Saxon and Welsh kingdoms in the case of Wessex, and Leon and Aragon in the case of Castile). Although their titles did not catch on, the role that these ‘emperors’ performed did, and by the thirteenth century some of the functions of imperial overlordship were exercised either by the papal court or by those rulers who exercised political hegemony within a given part of the medieval West—such as the Capetians within the regions bordering France, or the kings of England in Britain and Ireland. Instead of one universal empire, high medieval Europe faced a multiplicity of regional ones.
World History
