For the period as a whole, a rather different set of interpretations has come to the fore in recent years. As long ago as 1958, Archibald R. Lewis described the slowing-down of Latin expansion between 1250 and 1350 as the ‘closing of the medieval frontier’. With the historical parallel of the American West in mind, he asserted that ‘Few periods can be better understood in the light of a frontier concept than western Europe between 800 and 1500 ad... From the eleventh to the mid-thirteenth century Western Europe followed an almost classical frontier development,’ adding: ‘The [most] important frontier was an internal one of forest, swamp, marsh, moor and fen.’16 More recently, Robert Bartlett has identified the territorial expansion of Latin Christian society as the defining characteristic of the central Middle Ages. He partly attributes this process to three technological advantages enjoyed by the ‘Franks’ of western Europe: castles, archery (especially crossbowmen), and heavy cavalry. The physical expansion of the frontiers of Latin society were accompanied by great cultural change, as the aristocracy of north-west Europe in particular
16 A. R. Lewis, ‘The Closing of the Mediaeval Frontier, 1250-1350’, Speculum, 33 (1958), 475-83, at 475,476.
Exported its ethos in almost all directions, and combined this with a strong religious ideology. These warriors also found justifications to treat some avowedly Catholic regions at the peripheries of Latin Christendom, such as Ireland, as ripe for settlement and conquest, while elsewhere, such as in Scotland, Bohemia, and Byzantium, native rulers eagerly sought the services of warriors from western Europe. There could be a direct connection between the ‘transformation of the year 1000’ and the ensuing expansion of Latin Christendom, a hypothesis that Bartlett cautiously proposes: if the aristocracy was now monopolizing both military and economic resources as never before, and the concentration of its resources in castles was excluding the younger sons of the nobility (see pp. 48-50), it might explain the aggressiveness, cupidity, and rootlessness of the ‘Frankish’ warriors who migrated to the frontiers of Christendom.6
Bartlett’s thesis has not received universal acceptance. It risks blurring the differences between very different types of expansion: crusades to the Holy Land, for instance, occurred in a highly specific ideological context and brought financial ruin, not prosperity, to most participants. Many of the identifiable crusaders were rich heads of families, not impoverished ‘cadets’. It is also true that demographic growth had begun long before 950; that the Christian cause had often been invoked to justify territorial expansion (for instance, by Charlemagne against the Saxons in the late eighth century); and that the enlargement of Christendom through missionary activity had long been assisted by the attractiveness of Christian cultural concomitants to pagan rulers. Nor did Latin Christian expansion wholly cease around 1300 (see p. 210). Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that a peculiar combination of military superiority and religious enthusiasm dominated the fortunes of Latin Christendom in the central Middle Ages. In Chapter 6 Nora Berend discusses the conversion and integration of east-central and northern Europe into Latin Christendom, as well as the forceful expansion of Christians in the Mediterranean at the expense of Byzantium and Islam; she also considers these regions on their own terms, for many of these ‘new’ polities were also quite capable of aggressive expansion, and, as she shows, their experiences were very diverse.
Latin society did not expand at its geographical fringes alone. In Germany, there were about 200 towns in 1200; by 1350 there were about 2,ooo.7 Seigneurial enterprise often fostered rapid development: the eleven-fold increase in the population of Stratford-upon-Avon between 1086 and 1252 was largely due to the foundation of a new town there by the bishop of Worcester in the U90s.'8 The reclamation of uncultivated land constituted a different sort of ‘frontier’: William TeBrake has used this term for the Rhine delta in Holland in this period, for, although it lay in the geographical heart of Latin Christendom, the draining of the wilderness of peat bogs and polders had a dynamic effect upon Dutch society, much as many historians have argued that the great American wilderness influenced the formation of American society.9 While such an interpretation is as controversial for medieval Europe as it is for the nineteenth-century United States, there can be no doubt that vast tracts of the continent were brought into permanent cultivation.
These economic and demographic changes have led R. I. Moore to describe the more urbanized societies of north-west Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a genuinely new civilization, radically different from its early medieval predecessors in structure, economy, and belief.10 The following six chapters seek to characterize the Europe that evolved between c.950 and c.1320, and the Conclusion will consider the end of this period.
World History
