V

MEDIUM

Part II

The Middle Age, c.750–1270

EL CID

THE knight Rodrigo Díaz died in Valencia in 1099. In history he had spent a lifetime fighting both for the Moors and against them. But in legend he was elevated by the Arabic epithet of al-sayyid or El Cid, ‘the Master’; and he was turned into the spotless champion of the Christian cause, the national hero of Castile. The legend was already flourishing a century later, in the epic romance of El Canto del mío Cid.1 (See Appendix III, p. 1241.)

The transformation of historical figures into the special status of national heroes is a much more complicated process than the mere glorification of famous men or women. It is part of the search for a collective identity that can only be defined in distinction to hostile neighbours or oppressors. In England, whose history is peculiarly lacking in external invaders, the only possible candidate was Robin Hood, the shadowy outlaw who defended the common people against the Anglo-Norman barons.2 Among England’s neighbours the national heroes, whether Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, William Wallace the ‘Braveheart’, Hugh O’Neill, or Joan of Arc, could only be figures who fought the English. In later British history, British national heroes could only be military figures who, like Admiral Nelson or the Duke of Wellington, saved the empire from its foreign foes. In Albania, George Castriota (known as ‘Skanderbeg’, 1403–67) was seen, like El Cid, as the symbol of resistance to the Ottomans, although he too had both joined and deserted the Ottoman and the Muslim cause.

The cult of national heroes became obligatory when Romanticism collided with Nationalism in the nineteenth century (see p. 815). Nations who lacked an established ancient champion adopted more recent ones: Koáciuszko, Kossuth, and Shamil fought against the Russians; Andreas Hofer in Tyrol against the French; Janosik, the ‘Robin Hood of the Tatras’, against the Austrians. On the northern side of the Tatras, Janosik is the hero of the Polish highlanders: on the southern side, the national hero of Slovakia.3 It is fair comment on the state of European identity to recall that, as yet, there is no national hero or heroine of Europe.

All these innovations contributed to what scholars have called the ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’—the moment when, in the setting of enhanced confidence and prosperity, Western Christendom consciously sought to put its ideals into practice. Events such as the Investiture Contest or the Crusades were not just evidence of new energies; they were ‘ideological’. A thirst for knowledge was inherent in the new mentality. A marked increase in the production of books and the collection of libraries took place in recognized intellectual centres. The Latin classics were lionized; the Latin language was pruned and refined; Latin poetry came into fashion, high and low:

Meum est propositum in taberna mori,
Ut sint vina próxima morientis ori.
Tune cantabunt letius angelorum chori:
‘Sit Deus propitius huic potatori.’

(My resolution is to die in the tavern. May wine be near my dying lips. Then the angelic choirs will gaily sing: ‘May God show mercy on this boozer.’)

All manner of history-writing was undertaken, from simple annals and lives of the saints to sophisticated treatises such as Guibert de Nogent’s’ De pignoribus sanctorum (c.1119), William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum (1120), or Otto von Freising’s Gesta (c.1156) relating the exploits of Emperor Frederick I. In his fantastic Historia Regnum Britanniae (c.1136), Geoffrey of Monmouth assembled an imaginative collection of stories and legends from the Celtic past, which would be quarried and embellished by numerous poets and troubadours. The systematization of Canon Law, notably in the Decretum (1141) of Gratian of Bologna, accompanied the study of Roman law by a long line of glossators starting with Irnerius (fl. c.1130). Latin translations from Arabic and ancient Greek proliferated, by such scholars as Adelard of Bath or Burgundio di Pisa. Schools of law, medicine, and general learning flourished at Salerno, Montpellier, and, above all, at Bologna. North of the Alps, cathedral schools, as at Chartres or Paris, competed with the earlier monastic centres, where St Anselm of Aosta (1033–1109), sometime Abbot of Bec and Archbishop of Canterbury, had been a seminal figure. At Palermo in Sicily and Toledo in Spain the wisdom of the ancients, preserved by Arab scholars, was finally transmitted to Christendom. The commentaries of Averroes of Cordoba (Ibn Rushd, 1126–98) turned Aristotle into the philosopher of the Middle Ages. Muslim Spain gave Europe decimal numbers and mathematical expertise, [XATIVAH]

Courtly literature was composed in reaction against the boorish lifestyle of the barons and the stifling ethics of the Church. Initially, there were two main centres—at the northern French courts, which popularized the chansons de geste celebrating the exploits of Frankish and Arthurian chivalry, and at the court of Aquitaine at Poitiers, which specialized in the chansons d’amor, the songs of ‘courtly love’. The former, which was most productive in the decades after 1120, depended heavily on the cult of Charlemagne, especially in epics such as La Chanson de Roland and its derivatives—the Pélérinage de Charlemagne or La Prise d’Orange. The latter, which came into prominence after 1170, elaborated a stylized code of behaviour recorded in the thirty-one articles of De Arte Honeste AmanaX ‘the Art of Honest Love’, drawn up by one Andreas Capellanus. These rules, which gave the lead to the dompna or ‘mistress’ of the knight’s affections, reversed the accepted gender roles of the day and flouted matrimonial conventions. ‘Marriage’, said Andreas, ‘is no barrier to Love.’ The genre may well have had its origins in Muslim Spain; but it was taken up by troubadours across the south, whence it spread to the trouvères of the north and the Minnesingers of Germany. ‘Love’, wrote one of the authors of Tristan, ‘is stronger than laws.’ The acknowledged master of courtly romance, however, was Chretien de Troyes (c.1135–90), a native of Champagne, author of the Arthurian trilogy—Yvain, ou le Chevalier au Lion, Lancelot, ou le Chevalier à la Charrette, and Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal. [TRISTAN]

XATIVAH

THE art and craft of paper-making was first recorded in Europe in 1144 in the small Moorish town of Xativah, now San Felipe, near Valencia. It had taken 1,000 years to cross Eurasia from China, via Samarkand and Cairo. Important technical developments, including dipping moulds and watermarks, were pioneered a century later in Italy, most probably at Fabriano near Ancona. The first known watermark was a large F (for Fabriano).

From there paper spread far and wide, gradually replacing the older writing materials of papyrus, parchment, and pergamon. Early paper-mills were built at Ambert in Auvergne (1326), Troyes (1338), Nurnberg (1390), Leira in Portugal (1411), Hertford in England (mid-fourteenth-century), Constantinople (1453), Cracow (1491), and Moscow (1565). The demand for paper was greatly increased by the arrival of printing, [PRESS]

Standard paper sizes were introduced in Bologna in 1389: Imperial (22 x 30 inches), Royal, Medium, and Chancery. Book pages were made by folding sheets double (folio), twice (quarto), or three times (octavo). In 1783 the Montgolfier brothers, who owned a paper-works at Annonay, constructed their hot-air balloon from paper. But paper’s supreme contribution lay in the dissemination of knowledge. ‘Hail to the inventor of paper,’ wrote Herder, ‘who did more for literature than all the monarchs on earth.’

Handcrafted paper still has its enthusiasts today. There is an International Association of Paper Historians, with their journal based in Germany, and a score of paper museums. Antique paper-mills still function at Fabriano, at Moulin Ricard-en-Bas in France, at Koog aan de Zaan in the Netherlands, at Niederzwonitz in Germany, at St Alban in Basle, Switzerland, and at Duszniki Zdrój in Silesia.1

The German Empire’s struggle with the Papacy had always been complicated by Italian politics. But in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the problems became hopelessly entangled, and all parties to the conflict were seriously weakened. Apart from the Hildebrandine ideology of the Popes, the German emperors had to contend with the centrifugal tendencies of the tribal duchies, especially Saxony; with the dynastic rivalries within Germany, especially that of the Guelphs and the Hohenstaufen; with the sturdy independence of the Lombard cities; with the wayward city of Rome; and with the distant kingdom of the Sicilies. The road to imperial power, therefore, was strewn with hurdles. Contenders had first to win the support of the German nobles and bishops, and to win election as king in Germany. After that, there was a similar challenge to win the crown of Italy. Only then could they move into the end-game and seek imperial coronation by the Pope. For over a century this obstacle course consumed the energies of three forceful generations from the House of Hohenstaufen von Weiblingen— Frederick I Barbarossa, Henry VI, and the inimitable Frederick II.

Barbarossa (r. 1155–90), son of the Hohenstaufen Duke of Swabia and of a Guelph princess from Bavaria, was married to the heiress of the Franche-Comté and Aries, where he was crowned King. Hence, whilst enjoying an extensive power-base of his own, he was able to reconcile the warring German dukes. His chief Guelph rival, Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, was eventually ruined by a trial before the imperial court which stripped him of his main possessions. But a clash at the Diet of Besançon in 1157, where the papal legate described the imperial crown as an ecclesiastical ‘benefice’, revived the Investiture Contest. And a second clash at the Diet of Roncaglia in 1158, where the imperial party stressed the seniority of the podestà or ‘imperial governor’ over all other officials in the cities of the Empire, fuelled the endless wars of the Lombard leagues. Barbarossa re-enacted all the travails of his predecessors—excommunication by the Pope, the election of an antipope, feudal revolts in Germany, conflict in Rome, and six wearying Italian expeditions. On 24 July 1177, in the porch of St Mark’s, Venice, and on the centenary of Canossa, he fell on his knees before Pope Alexander III and obtained absolution. But, like Canossa, it was just a gesture. His master-stroke was to marry his son and heir, Henry (r. 1190–97), to the Norman heiress of Sicily, Constanza di Apulia. In 1186 he saw the young pair wed in Milan, which he had once reduced in a terrible siege eighteen years before. Confident of splitting the Papacy from its Sicilian allies, he departed with the Third Crusade, and never returned, [CONSPIRO]

Barbarossa’s grandson, Frederick II (r. 1211–50), was the offspring of the Sicilian connection. He inherited the personal union of Sicily with the Empire as established by his parents, and so cherished his Sicilian kingdom that he would be accused of neglecting the rest of his realms. Crusader, linguist, philosopher, ornithologist, patron of the arts, protector of Jews, and master of a harem, Frederick II was twice excommunicated by the Pope for disobedience and officially condemned by a General Council as a heretic. He ruled in the south as a despot, imposing an efficient, centralized administration on Church and State alike. He even encouraged an imperial cult of his own person. He presided over a brilliant, cultured court at Palermo—a magnificent blend of Latin, German, Jewish, Greek, and Saracen elements. To his contemporaries he was quite simply thestupor mundi, the ‘wonder of the age’.

However, to rule the whole of a disparate feudal empire by autocratic meanswas impossible, and beyond Naples and Sicily Frederick II was repeatedly obliged to make concessions to keep the imperial party intact. In Germany, after granting a charter of liberties to the Church (1220), he relinquished direct control of ecclesiastical lands in the hope of ruling through prelates such as Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne. As a result, he did succeed in having his son, Henry VII, elected King of the Romans. At the Diet of Worms in 1231 he ordered Henry to promulgate a Statutum in favorem principum, whereby the secular princes were granted the same far-reaching liberties as the bishops. In the East, he granted unlimited rights to his old crusading companion, Hermann von Salza, the first Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, who repeatedly tried to mediate on his behalf in Rome. In northern Italy his attempts to consolidate a dominant Ghibelline party were constantly thwarted by the spoiling tactics of the popes, especially Gregory IX (1227–41), and the league of Lombard cities.

CONSPIRO

THE League of the Holy Court, or Heilige Fehme, has the distinction of being Europe’s senior secret society—except for those which remained secret. It came into prominence in Germany, during the disorders which followed the imperial ban placed on Henry the Lion, chief of the Guelph party, in the late twelfth century. Its aim was to administer justice wherever imperial authority had collapsed and, by means of forest tribunals, administered by Freischöffen or francs-juges, to hold the populace in fear. The League had an élite caste of initiates, the Wissenden or ‘sages’, an elaborate system of oaths, signs, and rituals, and a hierarchical structure headed by the Oberststuhlherr—originally the Archbishop of Cologne. By the fourteenth century, it possessed 100,000 members. Its activities in Westphalia were officially recognized. In the fifteenth century, having recruited the Emperor Sigismund himself, its influence did not wane until the legal reforms of the 1490s. Its last meeting was held in 1568.

The Femgerichte (forest courts) followed exact procedures, hearing witnesses for prosecution and defence. But death was their only sentence. The condemned person was left hanging from a tree into which was stuck a knife bearing the mystical letters SSGG (standing for Stein, Strick, Gras, Grün—‘Stone’, ‘Rope’, ‘Grass’, ‘Green’).

Secret societies can be classified as political, religious, social, and criminal, though the categories have often overlapped. In the early seventeenth century, the mystical Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians chose to reveal its existence. Its occult theosophy was systematized by the Englishman Robert Fludd (1574–1637). It attracted considerable interest all over northern Europe, from Bacon and Descartes among others, and exercised an important influence on the early stages of Freemasonry [MASON].

Between 1776–85 the short-lived Order of Luminaries of Adam Weishaupt professed very advanced projects of social reform in Bavaria. Its members had close connections both with Freemasons and even with the Jacobins. The early nineteenth century saw the rise of the Carbonari (see p. 823), the Mafia, and the secret societies of Ireland. Some are still in existence.1 [ORANGE]

Conspiracy theories of history are not fashionable. But European history has never known a shortage of conspiratorial societies, conspiracies, or conspirators.

Frederick was living in a maelstrom that was not entirely of his own making. A papal ward in his youth, he had only been given Sicily on papal lease, and he was only raised to the Empire at the end of a twenty-year baronial war in Germany, where the Pope took against the previous incumbent and papal client, Otto of Brunswick. He was not present at the fateful battle of Bouvines in Flanders, when the French crushed Otto’s anti-papal coalition. It was an irony of the political carousel that the Papacy would then take against him. In 1235 he restored order in Germany by force, banishing his elder son Henry in favour of the younger Conrad. In 1236–7 he crushed the Lombard cities at Cortenuova and marched through Cremona with a parade of elephants. In 1241, having sunk a papal fleet off Genoa, he took a bevy of hostile archbishops and abbots hostage. But in 1248, after the abortive siege of Parma, he lost his harem. No power on earth, it seems, could have restrained the partisan hatreds of Guelph and Ghibelline.

After Frederick’s death, his son, Conrad IV (r. 1250–4), and grandson, Conradin (d. 1268), failed to enforce the Hohenstaufen succession, and the Empire was crippled once again by an extended interregnum (1254–73). The Papacy promptly reclaimed its overlordship of Sicily, which was turned over to the French Angevins. The popes, nominally victorious, were being pushed ever closer towards dependence on the kingdom of France. Under Gregory X (Tedaldo Visconti, 1271–6), arrangements were finalized for ensuring swift and effective papal elections, [CONCLAVE]

It was France which benefited most from the Empire’s distress. In the eleventh century the Capetian kings had been masters only of the tiny royal domain in the lle de France round Paris; elsewhere, the prerogatives of kingship had been virtually abandoned to the constituent fiefs. But as from Louis VI (r. 1108–37) a series of long-lived monarchs greatly enhanced the substance of France. In this they were assisted by a remarkable demographic boom, especially in the northern provinces, by the growth of prosperous communes, and by important territorial acquisitions, notably in the Midi. Louis VII (r. 1137–80) was strong enough to marshal the entire nobility of France for the Second Crusade, and later to leave the realm in peace during private pilgrimages to Compostela and to Canterbury.

After repudiating his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who promptly married his vassal, Henry II of England, he was mortified to watch the assemblage of a rival Plantagenet realm stretching from the Scottish borders to the Pyrenees. But the crisis passed; and the Capetians were to recover their supremacy. (See Appendix III, p. 1244.) [GOTHIC]

In this period, French and English affairs remained intimately entangled. The Angevin or ‘Plantagenet’ Dynasty came into being through the Anglo-Norman marriage of William the Conqueror’s granddaughter, Matilda, with Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. Their son, Henry II (r. 1154–89) put an end to the prevailing anarchy of Stephen’s reign, and stayed long enough with his queen, Eleanor, to procreate a line of monarchs that were to hold the English throne until 1399. His reign was marked by judicial reform, by the English invasion of Ireland, by incessant travelling to all points between Northumberland and Gascony, and by a conflict between Church and State culminating in the murder of Archbishop Becket (1170). His elder surviving son, Richard Coeur de Lion (r. 1189–99) was totally preoccupied with crusading. Richard’s brother, John Lackland (r. 1199–1216) lost his subjects’ trust through repeated acts of tyranny, lost the Duchy of Normandy through defeat at the Battle of Bouvines (1214), and lost the initiative in English politics through the concessions of Magna Carta (1215). John’s son, Henry III (r. 1216–72) was a long survivor, relegated by Dante ‘to the limbo of ineffectual souls’. (See Appendix III, p. 1252.)

Those early Plantagenet decades also saw the initial English incursions into Ireland. A band of Anglo-Norman adventurers led by Richard ‘Strongbow’, Earl of Pembroke, conspired to support the deposed king of Leinster. Their mailed knights made such advances following their landings in Wexford in 1169 that Henry II felt obliged to follow them and to receive the joint homage of the leading Irish kings. From then on, the English never left. John Lackland obtained the title of Dominus Hiberniae, ‘Lord of Ireland’, in his father’s lifetime. In 1210 he set up a regular English colony at Dublin, forming a cluster of counties governed by English law and by English justiciars. Under Henry III, the first discriminatory moves were made to legally separate the newcomers from the natives and to exclude the Irish from positions of power.

Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204) was perhaps the outstanding personality of the age. She made her mark not only as a woman of remarkable spirit but as a political and cultural patron of immense influence. She was the indomitable heiress to a great duchy. Married at 15, she had to be brought back from the Second Crusade under arrest for defying her royal husband. Divorced at 28, she remarried within two months, having engineered the dynastic coup of the century. Separated in her late forties through her second husband’s liaison with the Fair Rosamund of Godstow, she returned to rule in style in her native Poitiers. Among her children and grandchildren, she lived to see one emperor, three kings of England, kings of Jerusalem and Castile, a duke of Brittany, and another queen of France. At Poitiers, at the head of a like-minded band of ladies, she became ‘the Queen of the Troubadours’:

Domna vostre sui e serai,
Del vostre servizi garnitz.
Vostr’om sui juratz e plevitz,
E vostre m’era des abans.
E vos etz lo meus jois primers,
E si seretz vos lo derrers,
Tan com la vida m’er durans.

(Lady, I’m yours and yours shall be, I Vowed to your service constantly. I This is the oath of fealty 11 pledged to you this long time past. I As my first joy was all in you, I So shall my last be found there too, I So long as life in me shall last.)

Hostile French comment tried to blacken Eleanor’s reputation with tales of poisoning and incest. But she stands as the central figure in the cultural history of a land which her enemies were about to destroy.

For Aquitaine formed the central sector of a distinct cultural and linguistic region now known as Occitania. The langue d’oc, whose speakers said oc for ‘yes’, was quite separate from the langue d’oïl the ‘French’ language of northern Gaul. It was spoken right across the Midi from Catalonia to Provence. It transcended all poUtical frontiers from the Kingdom of Aragón to the Arélate (Kingdom of Burgundy-Aries), which still belonged to the Empire. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, on the eve of the French advance, it was the scene of one of Europe’s most brilliant civilizations.

Philippe-Auguste (r. 1180–1223) gave the French monarchy its decisive impetus. Whilst tripling the size of the royal domain, he drew great advantage by playing off the rivalries of Empire and Papacy. He laid the foundations of a national army and, through the system of baillis or royal bailiffs, of a centralized administration. He was then able to withstand the eternal intrigues of the tenants-in-chief, and to destroy the Plantagenet challenge. Having stripped John Lackland of his legal rights in France through charges of breaching feudal obligation, he followed up the courtroom’s decision with the sword. From 1202 he smoothly annexed Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, and most of Poitou. In 1214, at Bouvines, where he was unhorsed and saved by his vassals, he destroyed France’s imperial and Plantagenet foes on the same field.

His grandson, Louis IX (r. 1226–70), gave France the moral prestige which military and economic success could not. Having inherited the extended kingdom which his father, Louis VIII, had just secured in Aquitaine and Languedoc, he did not need to wage war on his neighbours. He personified the highest ideals of a Christian king, as then conceived, and his life by Jean, Sire de Joinville, presents an entrancing portrait. ‘Mon cher fils,’ he told his eldest son, ‘I beg you to love the people … For in truth, I would prefer that a Scotsman should… govern the people well and loyally, than that you should be seen to rule the kingdom badly.’ Louis had spent his youth under the regency of his mother, Eleanor’s grand-daughter, Blanche of Castile, when a dangerous feudal reaction arose. But his integrity and his limitless bank of marriageable relatives drew the great fiefs back into partnership with the Crown. In an age of intense litigiousness, he was the chosen arbiter of many a royal or feudal dispute, dispensing justice under the Oak of Vincennes. His treatment of the Jews and of the Midi was less than saintly. Yet towards the end of his long reign, St Louis was without contest the first prince of Christendom.

GOTHIC

VISITORS to the abbey of St Denis near Paris are shown the pointed arches in the apse which Abbot Suger completed in 1143 or 1144, and which are said to have initiated the Gothic style. Whether or not the work at St Denis preceded the Gothic vaulting at the cathedral of Sens, which was under construction during the same years, is a matter for debate. But France’s senior basilica, the site of numerous royal coronations and burials and home of the oriflamme, would be á fitting place for such a momentous event; and it certainly preceded both Notre-Dame de Paris, the masterpiece of the ‘transitional style’, and the glories of Chartres, Reims, and Amiens.

From its beginnings in France, the Gothic spread far and wide throughout the Catholic world to become the archetypal style for medieval church-building north of the Alps. Scores of Gothic cathedrals were built, from Seville in the west to Dorpat in the east, from Lund in the north to Milan in the south. They were imitated in thousands of parish churches.

Many experts would argue that the ultimate aesthetic effect was achieved at the Sainte-Chapelle, which was completed in Paris on the orders of St Louis on 25 April 1248. Smaller than the great cathedrals, it is an edifice of exquisite delicacy and light, its tall, slender windows filled with brilliant expanses of stained glass.

Far away, the castle chapel of the Holy Trinity in Lublin, between Vistula and Bug, is one of those cultural orientation points which enable one to see Europe as a whole. Built in pure Gothic style by King Władystaw Jagiełło (d. 1434), for a Polish-Lithuanian capital that never developed, it is a distant, rustic echo of the Sainte-Chapelle. At the same time, like the neighbouring Gothic cathedral of Sandomierz, its interior walls were painted in rich Byzantine splendour with murals designed by artists imported either from Ruthenia or possibly from Ottoman-occupied Macedonia. It lies at the point where the architecture of the West coincides with the decorative style of the East. The date of its completion is recorded, at the end of a long Cyrillic dedication in Old Church Slavonic, as St Lawrence’s Day, 1418.

The career of the Gothic style did not end, however, with medieval church-building. It was revived as the favourite architectural style of the Romantic era, which sought to recover its prestigious aesthetic appeal and to apply it to all manner of secular structures. Manchester City Hall, King Ludwig’s fantasy castle at Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, and the Austrian waterworks in Cracow are all descendants of Abbot Suger’s apse at the terminus of Metro Line 13.

All modern interpretations of Gothic style are coloured by those nineteenth-century enthusiasms. The theories of Schlegel, Ruskin, and Viollet-le-Duc were as crude as their propensity for ‘improving’ the medieval originals, including St Denis. From being a term of ‘unmitigated contempt’ for ‘savageness’, to use Ruskin’s words, Gothic became the object of unrestrained adulation.1 Goethe’s essay ‘Von deutscher Baukunst’ (On German Architecture), which mythologized the origins of Strasbourg Cathedral and its builder, Erwin von Steinbach, was an inspiration to many others. In due course it tempted German scholars to claim Gothic as their own. In fact, Gothic was one of the most international of styles, with numerous regional variants. It is one of the many strands on which theories about the unity of European culture might easily be built.2

In England, a normal baronial war produced an abnormal outcome. Henry III Plantagenet (r. 1216–72), Lackland’s son, had made himself unpopular with his barons by giving preference to his Poitevin, Savoyard, and Lusignan relatives, by an unsuccessful French war, and by extravagant building projects such as the renovation of Westminster Abbey. In 1258 a reforming faction emerged under the leadership of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, son of the Albigensian crusader (see below). By withholding a grant to solve the King’s financial problems, the reformers pushed through the Provisions of Oxford whereby the King’s administration was to be supervised by their nominees. When the King reneged, Simon waged war, and in the battle of Lewes succeeded in capturing the King, the King’s eldest son, and the King’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, King of Germany. In the following year the royal party rallied, and Simon was slain at Evesham (1265). In the interval, in January 1265, a new sort of Parliament had been summoned—not just from the magnates and prelates, but from the knights of the shires and from the burgesses of selected boroughs. For constitutionalists it was an important precedent, a decisive step on the road to limited monarchy—the first appearance of the House of Commons.

Yet it is doubtful whether England or France had any sense of their later national identities. In the thirteenth century the kingdom of England was still bound up with its Continental possessions. Its ruling class was still tied to the culture and ambitions of their French relations. France itself had only just acquired the territorial base, from the Channel to the Mediterranean, on which its future fortunes would be forged. There were many things about England which were considerably more ‘French’ than many parts of the new France.

The obsession with the recovery of the Holy Land lasted for 200 years and ended in failure. Between 1096 and 1291 there were seven major Crusades and numerous minor ones. The First Crusade (1096–9), led by the barons Godfroi de Bouillon, Raymond de St Gilles, Count of Toulouse, and Hugues de Vermandois, brother of the King of France, succeeded in capturing Jerusalem, massacring its inhabitants, and establishing a Latin kingdom in Palestine. The Second Crusade (1147–9), preached by St Bernard and led jointly by Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, achieved little except the incidental seizure of Lisbon from the Moors by an English fleet. The Third Crusade (1189–92), mounted by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philippe Auguste of France, and Richard Cceur de Lion of England, failed to retake Jerusalem. The Fourth Crusade (1202–4), diverted by the ambitions of the Doge of Venice, succeeded in capturing Constantinople, massacring its inhabitants, and establishing a Latin empire in Byzantium—which was not the point of the exercise. The Fifth (1218–21), Sixth (1248–54), and Seventh (1270) Crusades ended up in Egypt or in Tunis, where St Louis of France himself died of the plague. When the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land fell at Acre in 1291, there was no coherent response.

The conduct of the Crusaders was shocking—not only to modern sensibilities, but equally to contemporaries. St Bernard himself was moved to denounce it. They ravaged the countries through which they marched—Bohemia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Byzantium. In 1096 they killed up to 8,000 Jews in their progress through the Rhineland—the first major series of Europe’s pogroms. Their naval expeditions devastated the Mediterranean ports. They fought among themselves no less than against the Infidel. They fleeced their subjects to fill their coffers. ‘I will sell the city of London’, said Richard Cceur de Lion, ‘if I can find a buyer.’ The cost in wasted lives and effort was incalculable. One German emperor was drowned in a river in Cilicia; a second held the King of England to ransom; a third was excommunicated as he set sail for Palestine. Murder and massacre in the service of the Gospel were commonplace. Seventy thousand civilians were said to have been butchered in cold blood in the initial sack of Jerusalem. ‘The lives and labours of millions who were buried in the East, would have been more profitably employed in the improvement of their native country.’‘Arguably, the only fruit of the Crusades kept by the Christians was the apricot.’

Yet the horrors along the crusaders’ road often mask the deeper causes of their motivation. Religious fervour was mixed with the resentments of a society suffering from waves of famine, plague, and overpopulation. Crusading was a means to sublimate the pains of an indigent existence. In this, the well-fed knight with his well-shod retinue was far outnumbered by the hordes of paupers who followed in his wake. The ‘People’s Crusades’ and ‘Shepherds’ Crusades’ continued long after the major expeditions. For them, Jerusalem was the visionary city of Revelation, where Christ beckoned. The Crusades were ‘an armed pilgrimage’, ‘a collective imitatio Christi, a mass sacrifice which was to be rewarded by a mass apotheosis at Jerusalem’, the inspiration of ‘the messianism of the poor’.31 Successful crusaders of the knightly caste might be portrayed in stone in their parish church, their legs piously crossed in death. Most of their companions never came home, presumed dead. Of course, the concept of crusading was not limited to the Holy Land. The Latin Church gave equal weight to the northern crusades in the Baltic (see pp. 362–4) and to the ‘third flank’ in theReconquista in Spain (see p. 345).

The impact of the Crusades was profound. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1187) was the first experiment in a ‘Europe Overseas’.32 The eastern Mediterranean was reopened to trade and travel. The Italian cities, especially Venice and Genoa, flourished. The collective identity of the Latin Church was consolidated under papal leadership. The Crusades supplied a vast fund of heroism and curiosity which underlay the growth of medieval romance, philosophy, and literature. Yet the Crusades also served to strengthen the nexus between Western Christendom, feudalism, and militarism. They gave rise to the military orders. Through the misconduct of the Latins, and the disgust of the Greeks who witnessed the misdeeds, they rendered the reunification of Christendom virtually impossible. Above all, they reinforced the barriers between Christianity and Islam, poisoning relations in which Westerners were cast in the role both of aggressors and of losers. In short, the Crusaders brought Christianity into disrepute.

The military orders, especially the Hospitallers and the Templars, were central to the debate on crusading ethics. The ‘Knights of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem’ were created in 1099 after the first Crusade. They included military, medical, and pastoral brothers. After the fall of Acre they escaped to Cyprus, ruled Rhodes (1309–1522), and eventually Malta (1530–1801). The ‘Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon’ came into being in 1118 for the purpose of protecting pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem. They diversified, however, into banking and real estate, growing immensely rich from properties all over Christendom. They were suppressed in 1312 on false charges of magic, sodomy, and heresy brought against them by the King of France. Their emblem, two knights riding on one horse, goes back to the first Master, Hugues de Payens, who was so poor that he shared his horse with a friend. It was a curious bent of the medieval mind that men could reconcile monastic vows with soldiering. Both the Hospitallers and the Templars were international bodies with depots in all the countries of the West. The Teutonic Knights, in contrast, were diverted at an early stage to the Baltic (see below). The military orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara did not operate outside Spain.

The double conquest of Constantinople in 1203–4 well illustrates the doubtful virtues of the crusading movement. The army of the Fourth Crusade, which had congregated at Venice, soon fell prey to the schemes of the ageing Doge Enrico Dandolo and of the German King Philip of Swabia, who was married to Irene of Byzantium. The Doge saw a chance to enlarge the Republic’s possessions in the Levant; the King saw a chance to restore his exiled nephew to the Byzantine throne. So, in return for the hire of a fleet, the Crusaders had to agree to share their booty with the Venetians and to back the restoration of Alexius IV. In addition, when they failed to pay for their ships, they were obliged to seize the Hungarian port of Zara in Dalmatia as collateral. In July 1203 they sailed through the Dardanelles without resistance and stormed the sea-walls. But a palace revolution in Constantinople, where Alexius IV was strangled, robbed them of their victory; and in April they had to repeat the exercise. This time the city of Constantine was comprehensively ransacked, the churches pillaged, the citizens butchered, the icons smashed. Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was crowned ‘Basileus’ in St Sophia by a Venetian Patriarch. The Empire was parcelled out into Venetian colonies and Latin fiefs. At which point, at Adrianople in April 1205, the crusading army was annihilated by the Bulgars. They never came within a thousand miles of Jerusalem. They had committed ‘the Great Betrayal’.33

The Fourth Crusade left two Roman Empires in the East: the Latin ‘Empire of the Straits’ at Constantinople and the Byzantine rump ruled from Nicaea in Asia Minor. The former survived for sixty years until, in 1261, in the temporary absence of the Venetian fleet, the latter recovered its position. In the long run, Venice was the sole beneficiary.

None the less, the fiasco of the Fourth Crusade coincided with what many regard as the political apogee of the Latin Church—the Papacy of Innocent III (1198–1216). Born Lotario d’Anagni, Innocent was an instinctive power-broker who came nearest to the ideal of subordinating all rulers to ‘theocratic government’. In Germany he contrived both to crown one of the imperial contenders, Otto of Brunswick, and then to depose him. In France he refused to approve Philippe-Auguste’s matrimonial arrangements and, having placed the country under interdict, eventually forced the King to restore his Queen after a twenty-year separation. In England, after another lengthy struggle with King John, he again wielded the interdict and forced the King to submit. England joined Aragón, Sicily, Denmark, and even Bulgaria as vassals of the Holy See. The Xllth General Council of the Church, which convened in the Lateran in November 1215, saw 1,500 prelates from all over Christendom meekly adopting the Pope’s proposals.

In reality, the Latin Church was rather more influential in high politics than in the lives of ordinary men and women. The hierarchy was often out of touch with the people. Heresy, pagan reversions, fantastic superstitions, and fierce resentments of the Church’s wealth were prevalent. To combat the crisis, Innocent III gave his blessing to two new orders of mendicant brothers, who were to live exemplary lives of communal service among the masses. The Order of Preachers (OP), the Black Friars or Dominicans, was founded by a Castilian, St Dominic Guzman (1170–1221), who fixed their rule in two general Chapters in 1220–1. Ever since they have been specially devoted both to evangelizing and to study. The Order of Friars Minor (OFM), the Minorites or Grey Friars, was founded by St Francis of Assisi (c.1181–1226) and received their papal charter in 1223. Ever since, they have been specially devoted to moral teaching. Both Dominicans and Franciscans accepted men and women, and were sworn to corporate and individual poverty. Until further developments were halted in 1274, they were joined by other mendicants including the Poor Clares, the Carmelites or White Friars, and the Austin Friars. Unlike the monks, whose piety was sometimes suspect, the ‘jovial friar’ was as popular with the laity as he was unpopular with the high clergy.

St Francis is undoubtedly the most endearing figure of medieval Christianity. Born the son of a rich merchant of Assisi in Umbria, he changed his clothes for those of a beggar and renounced his inheritance. He was the ‘husband of Lady Poverty’. He lived for a time as a hermit in a cave above Assisi, but in 1219 accompanied a crusading expedition to Egypt. He had more direct influence on the foundation of the Poor Clares than of the Franciscans. In 1224, when he was praying on Monte Verna, his body was impressed with the Stigmata—scars corresponding to the wounds of the crucified Christ. His legendary ability to commune with Nature is conveyed in his ‘Canticle to the Sun’ and in the later Fioretti (The Little Flowers of St Francis and his Companions). He was the author of hymns and prayers which go to the heart of the Christian ethos:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
Where there is darkness, light,
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console,
To be understood, as to understand,
To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.34

The friars were instrumental in another development of the age—the rise of universities. The ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ had established the principle that secular learning had value apart from theology. But it was not acceptable that educational institutions should be set up without licence of the Church. Hence the idea of a Studium Generale or ‘university’, divided into four or five faculties— Theology, Law, Medicine, Arts or Philosophy, and Music—incorporated by charter and regulated by a self-governing academic body. Among Europe’s senior universities, after Bologna (1088, refounded 1215) came Paris (c.1150) and then Oxford 1167). By 1300, a score of foundations had proliferated in Italy, France, England, and Spain, with many more to come. (See Appendix III, p. 1248.)

The Albigensian Crusade (1209–29) illustrates a very different aspect of medieval Christianity. In 1199 Innocent III had declared heresy to be ‘treason against God’. The target of his fulminations were the Cathars or ‘Albigensians’ of Languedoc. Spiritual descendants of the ancient Gnostics, Manichaeans, and Bogumils, the Cathars had left traces of an earlier presence in Bosnia and had been the subject of a heresy trial in Milan. They then spread rapidly in the weaving towns of Albi, Agen, Pamiers, Carcassonne, and Toulouse, where they gained the protection of the local counts. They believed that the prevalence of evil contradicted the existence of a sole benign Creator; that good and evil, therefore, must be separate creations. They were vegetarian, ascetic, puritanical; they practised the equality of men and women; and they supported a caste of perfecti who administered the rite of consolamentum, the ‘laying on of hands’. In 1167 they had held a dissident Council, at Saint Félix de Caraman near Toulouse, which was in touch with fellow dissidents of the same persuasion in Asia Minor. The Xlth General Council of the Church, called in 1179 to discuss the problem, had made no progress; and the preaching of St Dominic was equally fruitless. In 1209 the murder of a papal legate was used as the pretext for launching a general attack. [BOGUMIL]

Innocent III pronounced a Crusade on the same terms as the Crusades against Islam—the remission of sins and unrestricted loot. In the first phase, between 1209 and 1218,12,000 knights from France and Burgundy, under Simon de Montfort the Elder, battled the heretics under the Raymonds VI and VII of Toulouse. In the second phase, from 1225 to 1271, the armies of the King of France entered the fray. The Cathars faced the choice between abjuration or death. Many chose death. The Holy Inquisition, led by a Cathar defector, Robert the Bugger,* spread a veritable reign of torture and terror. In 1244, at Montségur, the holy place of the Perfects, 200 recalcitrants were burned alive in one vast pyre. Year by year, village by village, by sword and by trial, the extirpation went on. The castle of Queribus fell in 1255. By the fourteenth century the surviving ex-Cathars found themselves in the Roman Catholic fold. Their province of Languedoc found itself in the kingdom of France. The unity of France was built on the misery of the Midi.35

Crusading, however, had further uses. If it could be used against the infidel, it could also be used against the heathen nearer to home. In 1147, at Frankfurt, St Bernard had found that the Saxon nobles were much keener on attacking their Slavonic neighbours than marching to the Holy Land. A papal bull, Divina dispensation, was obtained, and St Bernard urged the northern crusaders ‘to fight the heathen until such time as, by God’s help, they shall either be converted or wiped out’.36 The Wendish Crusade (1147–85) saw Saxons, Danes, and Poles reducing the obstinate tribes of Mecklenburg and Lusatia to the Catholic obedience. (See Plate 26.)

In 1198 Hartwig II, Archbishop of Bremen, launched another ‘continuous crusade’ in Livonia. Assisted by an Order of armed German monks, the Brothers of the Sword, based at Riga, he created an organization which gradually brought all the north-east Baltic under Catholic control. Livonia was subdued by the Order, Estonia by the Danes, and Finland by the Swedes. Their exploits were recorded c.1295 by the nameless author of the Livlandische Reimchronik, who describes the urge to kill and burn in the name of the Lord:

The first of the fires that burned that day
Was lit by the hand of a Friar Grey,
And a Blackfriar followed after.37 [DANNEBROG]

The Prussian Crusade began in 1230. The Prussians had preserved their independence since the days of St Vojtech, and were worrying the local Polish princes by their incessant raiding. One of those princes, Konrad Mazowiecki (Conrad of Mazovia), determined to solve the problem by calling in a minor military Order, the Teutonic Knights, unemployed since their recent expulsion from the Holy Land. He was sowing the dragon’s teeth: instead of completing their contract and departing, the Knights obtained charters of permanent crusading rights from both the Emperor and the Pope, and dug in for the duration. By playing off their various sponsors, they were able to escape the control of all. The bull Pietati proximum (1234), claiming Prussia as a papal fief, remained a dead letter, as did a similar imperial decree of 1245 claiming Courland, Semigalia, and Lithuania for the Empire. The Knights-Brothers, in their white surcoats with black crosses, pressed on regardless, building forts and trading posts as they went—Thorn (Toruñ 1231), Marienwerder (Kwidzyn 1233), Elbing (Elblag 1237). By 1295, after a final heathen revolt, Prussia had become the Teutonic State, an independent crusading enterprise in the heart of Europe.

DANNEBROG

ON 15 June 1219, the Danish expedition to Estonia faced disaster. The native Estonians had just submitted to King Valdemar the Victorious, who was preparing to baptize them. But they rushed the Danish camp at nightfall, killed the bishop, and drove the crusaders towards the sea. According to legend, the fate of the battle only turned when the heavens let fall a red banner with a white cross, and a voice was heard urging the Danes to rally round it. Valdemar triumphed; the city of Tallin or ‘Danish Castle’, was founded; and Denmark adopted the dannebrog or ‘red rag’ as the national flag.1

Since then, every independent nation has adopted a flag of its own. Many, like the Dannebrog, bear a cross—the red cross of St George in England, the diagonal blue cross of St Andrew for Scotland, Sweden’s yellow cross on a blue ground. Switzerland adopted Denmark’s colours, but a different cross. The Union Jack of the United Kingdom, which combines the crosses of SS George, Andrew, and Patrick, was first flown after the Irish Union on 1 January 1801.

All European monarchies possess a royal standard in addition to the national flag. Denmark’s royal standard, which carries three lions statant azure, with hearts gules, on a field or, pre-dates the Dannebrog.

Following the example of the Netherlands (1652), most modern republics have adopted simple tricolours or bicolours. Some of these, like the French (1792), the Italian (1805), or the Irish (1922), are vertical. Others, like those of Germany (1918) or Russia (1917), are horizontal. Most have had to contend with flags of rival regimes. National flags are a focus for patriotism, and a vital symbol of identity. The sequence in which they were adopted is not irrelevant to the uneven maturity of Europe’s national communities.

The methods and motives of the Teutonic Knights have long been the subject of controversy. Their neighbours in Poland and Pomerania, against whom they fought incessandy, complained bitterly to the Pope, and later brought the matter to the Council of Constance. More sympathetic observers have not seen the discrepancy:

The dominant motive of the Teutonic Knights, as of all crusaders, was the desire for atonement through sacrifice. The method chosen may seem bizarre, especially when contrasted with the ministry of love carried on by the Franciscans… but the Teutonic Knights and the Friars … had this in common: they were both trying to achieve redemption and holiness without cutting themselves off from the practical world they shared a monastic dedication to an unmonastic way of life.38

Thus did civilization advance.

In the thirteenth century Eastern Europe was stormed by invaders who made the Teutonic Knights look like laggards. The Mongols of Genghis Khan swept out of the Asian steppes like a whirlwind, first in 1207, when Juji, son of Genghis, subjugated southern Siberia, and then in 1223, when they ravaged Transcaucasia and destroyed a Kievan army on the Kalka River. In 1236–7 Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis, crossed the Urals, ravaged the principalities of Ryazan and Vladimir, and razed Moscow. He took Kiev by siege in 1240 before moving off to the west. In 1241 Galicia was ravaged and Cracow razed. On 9 April 1241 the Polish princes under Henry the Bearded were cut to pieces on the field of Legnica in Silesia. As proof of their victory the Mongols were said to have collected nine sackfuls of right ears from the bodies of the slain. Another column of the horde swept on to Hungary, where a similar fate awaited the Magyar princes under Bela IV on the river Tisza. Batu then returned eastwards, setting up his camp at Saray near the mouth of the Volga. Similar trails of destruction were blazed again in 1259 and in 1287. [HEJNAL]

The Mongol invasions transformed the face of several countries. The horsemen of Batu Khan settled down on the Volga for good. The state of the ‘Golden Horde’, which they created between Volga and Don, supplanted that of the Volga Bulgars, whose sumptuous capital they razed. The khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, which were eventually to be annexed by Muscovy in 1552–6, put an Asiatic population in place that is the basis of modern ‘Tatarstan’. The Tartars of Crimea established a thriving state from their seat at Bakshishsarai that lived for centuries from theirczambuls or ‘raiding-parties’. Their presence provoked the rise of the later Cossack communities of the Dnieper and Don, and long delayed the settlement of adjoining Ukraine.

HEJNAŁ

HEJNAŁ, which derives from the Hungarian word for the dawn and, by extension for reveille, has passed into the Polish language as a term for the trumpet-call which sounds the alarm on the enemy’s approach.

Hejnal krakowski

Today, the hejnał mariacki or ‘trumpet-call of St Mary’s’ is one of the many curiosities of old Cracow. It is sounded from the top of the tower of the ancient church which overlooks the city square. It is sounded on the hour, every hour of the day and night, winter and summer; and each time it is repeated four times: to north, south, east, and west. It consists of a simple melody of open chords, which is always cut short in the middle of the final cadence. It commemorates the trumpeter who, whilst raising the alarm in 1241, or perhaps in 1259, was shot through the throat by a Mongol arrow. His call, though interrupted, enabled the burghers to flee. The survivors undertook to endow a town trumpeter in perpetuity.

The ritual has been maintained for over 700 years, with only short interruptions in the nineteenth century, and during the German occupation of 1939–45. It is older than the church from which it is sounded. The melody took its present form in the seventeenth century. After 1945, Polish Radio adopted it as a prelude to its daily time signal at twelve noon. It reminds millions of listeners both of the ancient pedigree of Polish culture and of Poland’s exposed location. It is one of the few active mementoes of Genghis Khan, and of the irruption of his horsemen into the heart of Europe.1

On 25 October 1405 the Swiss city of Lausanne was ravaged by fire. The Bishop promptly issued an eleven-point edict on fire precautions. Article 5 stated that ‘at every hour of the night, one of the watchmen on the tower of the Cathedral is obliged to shout the hour and to call to the watchmen of the city’s other wards … on pain of 6 deniers for every failing.’ Six centuries later, from 10 o’clock every evening, the watchman’s call still echoes to the four winds: ‘II a sonné dix!’

At Ripon in Yorkshire, they say that the ‘charter horn’ has ‘sounded the trump’ every evening since 886.

The European Ground and Tower Watch Association was founded in 1987 at Ebeltoft in Denmark. Most of its members represent modern revivals. Cracow, Lausanne, and Ripon, together with Annaberg, Celle, and Nordlingen in Germany, and Ystad in Sweden belong to the select company which can claim to have kept the watch ‘since the beginning’.

Poland and Hungary, denuded of much population, were left to recover as best they could. In both cases, since a ready supply of colonists was available in the German Empire, the Mongol invasions accelerated an existing process of migration and colonization. In this period German and Flemish settlers moved into Silesia and Pomerania, and also into Transylvania. The princes’ ‘locators’ offered land on favourable terms of tenure, and persuaded whole convoys of peasant migrants to trek east. At the same time, the cities were rebuilt and provided with charters on the model of the Magdeburg or, less frequently, the Lübeck Law. The cities of that vintage—Breslau (1242), Buda (1244), Cracow (1257) and others— were governed by German law and were full of German merchants. Added to the activities in the Baltic both of the Hanseatic League and of the Teutonic Knights, these changes brought about a massive increase of German influence, [BUDA] [HANSA]

The Mongols destroyed all semblance of unity among the east Slavs whose lands they had subjugated. Some of the princes of Rus’ were eventually able to escape by turning to their Lithuanian neighbours (see p. 392). But those in the East were forced, quite literally, to ‘bend the neck’. Summoned at regular intervals to the camp of the khan, they were obliged to walk between blazing bonfires, to stoop beneath the proffered yoke, and to prostrate themselves before their master. It was a ritual humiliation whose purpose was not forgotten. Their people were condemned to pay tribute, collected by resident Mongol baskiki or ‘governors’. But the Orthodox Church was not oppressed. It was the period of ‘the Tartar Yoke’.

There is a description of ‘the province of Russia’ at this time in the travels of the Venetian Marco Polo, whose father had visited the Crimea on a trading venture in 1260:

The province… is of vast extent… and borders upon that northern tract which has been described as the Region of Darkness. Its inhabitants are Christians, and follow the Greek ritual… The men are extremely well-favoured, tall and of fair complexion; the women are also… of a good size, with light hair which they are accustomed to wear long. The country pays tribute to the king of the Western Tartars… Within it are collected in great abundance the furs of ermines, sables, martens, foxes … together with much wax. It contains several [silver] mines… [It] is an exceedingly cold region, and I have been assured that it extends even as far as the Northern Ocean, where … peregrine falcons are taken in vast numbers.39

Contrary to former assumptions, economic life in the Middle Ages was not stagnant. There is a school of thought which holds that ‘an agricultural revolution’ in northern Europe at this time was ‘equally decisive in its historical effects’ as ‘the so-called Industrial Revolution’ of the nineteenth century.40 The argument centres on new sources of power such as the water-mill and the windmill, on expanded mining activities, on the impact of the iron plough and horsepower, and on crop rotation and improved nutrition. New techniques sometimes took centuries to be widely applied, but the chain effect over time was decisive. Agriculture moved into the heavier but more fertile soils of the valleys. The increased food supply fuelled a demographic explosion, especially in northern France and the Low Countries. The rising population filled the new towns and released a new labour force. The labour force could be employed in new industrial enterprises such as mining and weaving: specialized textile towns proliferated. Sea trade was steadily expanded, [PLOVUM] [MURANO]

BUDA

IN 1244, King Bela IV of Hungary granted a charter of autonomy to the I ‘free city of Pest’ on the Danube. His decision formed part of a wider programme of reconstruction following the recent Tartar invasions. Henceforth, the city was to govern itself according to the Law of Magdeburg, the king ceding all but residual powers. In due course, similar arrangements would be made for the castle suburb of Buda on the opposite bank of the river, creating two distinct jurisdictional units within the one urban area.1 Buda, which in German was known as Ofen, succeeded Esztergom as Hungary’s royal capital in 1361.

The future life of a city was greatly influenced by the nature of the authority which granted its founding charter. Although municipal charters granted by kings and princes were most common, bishops were often active, especially in Germany. Wherever the nobility was strong, as in Hungary and Poland, private cities also sprang up, providing oases of immunity from the long arms of Church and State. The growth of cities greatly strengthened the centrifugal tendencies of late medieval polities. In Hungary, it complemented the existing system of territorial counties and of noble liberties.

A city’s adoption of the Magdeburg model does not necessarily mean that it was a German settlement. The Magdeburg Law was adopted all over East and Central Europe by German and by non-German cities alike. None the less, there was always a strong German community both in Pest and in Buda even under Ottoman rule. The twin cities were not joined into one joint municipality until 1872, shortly after Hungary re-asserted its separate existence within the Habsburgs’ dual Monarchy. In 1896, they played host to an extravagant festival celebrating the millennium of Hungary’s foundation.

Hungary’s Millennium naturally focused on the person of St Stephen and on the gift of a crown by the Pope. This event, like the founding of Pest, was understood to have cemented the lasting connection with the West. Stephen’s queen, Gisella, was sister to Henry of Bavaria (the future German Emperor, who was also canonized). His coronation in AD 1001 helped him oust his Bulgarian- and Orthodox-backed rivals for the throne. From then on, like Poland, Hungary was firmly committed to the Western, Catholic camp.

The crown, which bears St Stephen’s name and which is now the prime exhibit in the Hungarian National Museum, came to symbolize Hungary’s extraordinary powers of survival. It was supposedly worn by all the Hungarian kings from the Arpads to the Habsburgs, and was a necessary adjunct to all valid coronations. It was many times lost or hidden, but never destroyed. In -1405 it fell unnoticed into an Austrian bog, whilst being illegally exported by Sigismund of Luxembourg, but was recovered when the bog started to glow with heavenly rays. In 1945 it was smuggled out of the country again, taken to the USA, and secretly deposited in Fort Knox. It was returned to Budapest in 1978, even though Hungary was still a communist-ruled country.

It is interesting to find, therefore, that doubts have been raised whether ‘St Stephen’s Crown’ had ever belonged to St Stephen. Nor, despite later attributions, is it likely to have originated in Rome. According to the most recent scholarly opinions, the principal gold band, the corona graeca, was made in eleventh-century Byzantium, probably for Synadene, consort to Geza I (r. 1074–7). In the traditional view, this ‘Greek Crown’ was welded onto an older crown, the corona latina, which had been made for Stephen I.2 In the modern view, its only possible link with St Stephen lies in the original cross, a relic of the True Cross now lost, which once topped the arched bands of the Latin Crown.

Whatever their origins, the two constituent parts of the Crown, the Greek and the Latin, combine to present the aptest of reminders not of Hungary’s western connections but of medieval Hungary’s location at the heart of Christendom. The Greek Crown carries a ring of alternating gem-stones and of small plaques of cloisonne enamel. At the front, above the forehead, stands a raised plaque of Christ Pantokrator: at the rear, a corresponding plaque of the Emperor Michael VII Dukas (r. 1071–8) with green aureole. On either side of the Emperor there are portraits of the emperor’s son Constantine and of King Geza. Geza’s plaque is accompanied by a Greek inscription: GEOBITZAS PISTOS KRALES TURKIAS (Geza the believer king of Turkia). Elsewhere round the rim runs a circle of Byzantine archangels and saints. The Latin crown, in contrast, carries eight plaques of the apostles, with Christ enthroned at the crossing-point of its bands. A leaning gold cross, which replaced the original in 1551 at the time of the first Habsburg coronation, precariously surmounts the whole.3

What is certain is the aptness of the quality with which the Crown is said to be most strongly endowed—its inadmissibility, ‘its incapacity to be permanently lost’.4

MURANO

MURANO is an island in the Venetian lagoon. It is the site of a Romanesque church, Santa Maria e Donato, dating from 999, and the glassworks of the former Venetian Republic.

Glass-making has been practised in Europe since ancient times, but Greek and Roman glass was coarse in texture and opaque in colour. It was only at Murano, near the turn of the thirteenth century, that the glass-masters created a product that was both tough and transparent. For several decades the formula remained secret; but then it leaked to Nuremberg, whence it spread to all corners of the continent.

Transparent glass made possible the science of optics, and was crucial in the development of precision instruments. The principles of the lens and the refraction of light were known by the time, c.1260, that Roger Bacon was credited with designing the first pair of spectacles. (There is a portrait of the Emperor Henry VII (d. 1313) wearing spectacles in one of the stained glass windows of Strasbourg cathedral.) Glass windows gradually came into fashion between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, first in churches and palaces and later in more humble dwellings. Glass flasks, retorts, and tubes facilitated the experiments of alchemy, later of chemistry. Glassclochesand greenhouses transformed market-gardening. The microscope (1590), telescope (1608), barometer (1644), and thermometer (1593), all glass-based, revolutionized our views of the world. The silvered mirror, first manufactured at Murano, revolutionized the way we see ourselves.

The social consequences of glass were far-reaching. The use of spectacles extended the reading span of monks and scholars, and accelerated the spread of learning. Windows increased the hours and efficiency of indoor work, especially in northern Europe. Workplaces could be better lit and better heated. Greenhouses vastly improved the cultivation of flowers, fruit, and vegetables, bringing a healthier and more abundant diet, previously known only in the Mediterranean. Storm-proof lanterns, enclosed coaches, and watch-glasses all appeared, whilst precision instruments encouraged a wide range of scientific disciplines, from astronomy to medicine.

The mirror had important psychological consequences. People who could see a sharp image of their own faces developed a new consciousness. They became more aware of their appearances, and hence of clothes, hairstyles, and cosmetics. They were also led to ponder the link between external features and the inner life, in short, to study personality and individuality. They developed interests in portraiture, biography, and fashion. The very unmedieval habits of introspection were strongly reflected in Rembrandt’s, paintings, for example, and ultimately in the novel. TheGalerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) at the palace of Versailles was opened on 15 November 1684. It was a wonder of the age. Spanning the full façade of the central pavilion and overlooking the park, its colossal mirrors reflected the light of seventeen huge windows and seventeen colossal chandeliers. It was the secular counterpart to the medieval stained glass of Chartres.

The ancients had seen through glass darkly. The moderns saw through it clearly, in a shocking, shining cascade of light that reached into their innermost lives.1

Other historians would go still further. Compared to previous conditions, the growth of cities was spectacular; and their activities have been seen as evidence for the ‘take-off’ of a European economy.41 This is perhaps an exaggeration. The huge annual fairs which were held from 1180 onwards on the plains of Champagne, at Lagny, Provins, Troyes, or Bar-sur-Aube, were indeed a major development. They were located midway between the urban centres in Lombardy, in the Rhineland, in the Low Countries, and in northern France; and they provided the meeting-point for merchants and financiers with international connections. One can say that they were the focus of a Europe-wide, if not an all-European, economic system.

Urban wealth underlay many of the political problems. City corporations were acquiring the means to challenge the authority of the local bishop or count, just as the guilds and merchant associations could press the city fathers. (The first recorded strike was organized by the weavers of Douai in 1245.42) The feudal order was weakening from within. In Germany, the sturdy independence of cities such as Cologne or Nuremberg helps to explain why neither the Church nor the barons could reimpose the authority of the Hohenstaufen. In Italy, the colossal resources of Milan, Genoa, Venice, and Florence explain why the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines were so intractable, why neither Pope nor Emperor would desist. In Flanders, urban overpopulation supplied an important element in the migrations to the East. There were marked contrasts between Eastern and Western Europe— which none the less, and as always, betrayed strong indications of interdependence. Europe was on the move.

Schiedam, County of Holland, 5 December 1262. Hendrik, Bishop of Utrecht, on the Eve of St Nicholas granted a licence to a church built and endowed ‘on the new land’ at Schiedam by the Countess Aleida van Henegouwen, Regent of Holland and Zeeland:

Henricus Dei Gratia Traiectensis episcopus universis presentes literas inspecturis salutem in Domino sempiternam. Cum illustris domina, dilecta nostra consanguínea domina Aleidis, uxor quondam domini lohannis de Avennis, Hollandie et Selandie tutrix, in nova terra apud Schiedam in divini honorem nominis de novo ecclesiam construí fecerit et dotaverit eandem, nos ipsius in hac parte piis supplicationibus inclinati ad huiusmodi structuram ecclesiae licentiam concedimus…43

PLOVUM

THE heavy, iron, three-piece plough or plovum was a far more sophisticated implement than its predecessor, the simple wooden ‘scratch-plough’ or aratrum. Equipped with a vertical sod-cutter or coulter, a horizontal ploughshare, a tilted mouldboard, and usually with wheels, it could turn the heaviest soils. Yet it demanded the sort of tractive power that was rarely available in the ancient world. A thousand years passed between its earliest sighting by Pliny in the Po valley and its general adoption in northern Europe in the eleventh to twelfth centuries. For all that time, the main problem was how to pull it. In the early Middle Ages ox teams were the norm. Land was measured in ox-hides and ox-gangs, i.e. in units of ploughland that could be served by one ox-team. But the ox was painfully slow; and a full team of eight oxen was expensive both to buy and to feed. Horses were only bred in the fast but smaller and less powerful breeds.

Five developments were required before the iron plough could come into its own. First was the breeding of heavy farm-horses—an offshoot of the Carolingian charger. Second was the horse-collar, not noted before AD 800, which enabled the draught animal to haul maximum loads without being throttled. Third was the horseshoe, adopted c.900. Fourth was the cultivation of oats, the workhorse’s staple food. Most important of all was the introduction of the three-field system of crop rotation. The change from the two-field to the three-field plan greatly improved crop yields whilst increasing the peasant family’s productivity by at least 50 per cent. It permitted the growing of all four cereals, and effectively distributed the peasant’s toil between spring and autumn sowing. But it demanded a marked rise in ploughing capacity. (See Plate 29.)

By the twelfth century at the latest, all the elements of the northern agricultural revolution were in place from France to Poland. Historians may have modified some of the simpler equations of the subject, such as Meltzen’s ‘Scratch-plough + cross-ploughing = square fields’ or Marc Bloch’s famous ‘Three-piece plough + wheels = strips = open fields = communal agriculture’. But the main lines are now generally accepted. Square-shaped upland fields, which required cross-ploughing, were often abandoned, whilst long open-strip fields made their appearance in the heavy but fertile lands of the valley bottoms. Europe’s landscape was altered once and for all. The fields were adorned with the familiar pattern of ridge-and-furrow. Time saved from ploughing could be used to extend the arable. Forests were felled, marshes drained, polders reclaimed from the sea. Larger villages clustered in the valleys, and the working of the strips was regulated by new forms of communal management. The village council and the manorial economy both went into action. From it all, Europeans gained a growing supply of ever more nutritious food that was to sustain a correspondingly greater population until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.1

Two years later, the Countess Aleida ordered a dam and sluice to be built across the stream of the Schie at the point where it flowed into the tidal waters of the Rhine delta. Its purpose was to regulate the channel which linked the nearby town of Delft with its tiny river-port of Delfshaven. It was to be built in conjunction with another dike and dam across a still smaller rivulet, the Rotte, two miles upstream. Three years after that, on 11 August 1270, the young Count Floris V granted privileges to the burghers of Rotterdam.44 About the same time, construction of a dam began on the River Amstel, 35 miles to the north. Step by step, the Rhine delta was being tamed.

Though not the earliest man-made constructions in the area, the dams were specifically designed to aid commercial navigation in the perilous wastes which stretched in a huge arc over some 25,000 km2 (10,000 sq. miles) between the Scheldt and the Ems (see Map 13, opposite). In retrospect, they may be seen as crucial steps in the evolution of Europe’s most densely populated country, of the world’s largest port, and of one of Europe’s most distinctive nations. It could not have seemed so at the time.

The country of Holland was one of the more remote and underdeveloped districts of the Holy Roman Empire. Its name, meaning Holt-land or ‘Marshland’, underlined the fact that it was entirely dominated by the watery wastes. It was the lowest of all the low countries, the Nederlanden. Between the ring of sand islands on the seaward side and the inland terra firma, at least two-thirds of its surface area lay below sea-level. It consisted for the most part of mud-flats, salt-marsh, flood-banks, brackish lakes, and treacherous wadden or shallows. Travel was usually by boat, except in the winter when the shallow waters froze solid to form roads across the ice.

The Rhine delta was the most recent and most mobile of Europe’s landforms. Created in the few thousand years since the last Ice Age, it had been shaped by the contending forces of three north-flowing rivers—the Scheldt (Escaut), the Maas (Meuse), and the Rijn (Rhine)—and of the westerly winds and tides of the sea. As a result, it was visibly subject to change and movement. The seaborne sand had formed a massive barrier of dunes up to 70 m high and 4 or 5 km wide. Behind this, the river-borne sediment piled up in ever-shifting configurations, whilst the freshwater flow gushed and probed against the points of least resistance in the unceasing battle to force new outlets to the sea. In Roman times, a number of coastal forts had stood on the sand barrier beyond a great inland lagoon, the Fleo Lacus. The main waters of the ‘Old Rhine’ reached the sea through a channel which still exists in modern Leiden, whilst the ‘Old Maas’ wound its separate way some twenty miles further south.

But the intervening millennium had wrought several dramatic alterations. In 839 a great flood had diverted the principal Rhine flow into the Maas, creating the interlinked channels of Lek, Waal, and ‘New Maas’. The freshwater lagoon to the north, starved of water, partly silted up. Then, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a warmer climatic phase caused a gradual rise in the sea-level. The dune barrier was breached repeatedly, the estuary of the Scheldt was split into several channels, opening Antwerp to sea traffic; and islands proliferated. The salt water rushed in to turn the northern lagoon into a broad sea bay, the Zuider Zee, which cut Frisia in two. High tides were overrunning the tributaries of the mainchannels, threatening the livelihood of the towns on their banks. This was the problem that inspired the construction of the dams.

Map 13. The Low Countries, 1265

Prior to the mid-thirteenth century, human habitation in the delta region had been limited to three types of location. There was a string of ancient towns on the edge of the mainland. Arnhem (Arenacum or ‘Sandtown’), nearby Nijmegen (Noviomagum or ‘New Market’), and Utrecht (Trajectum ad Rhenam or ‘Rhine Ford’) were all Roman foundations. Antwerp (Aen de Werpen or ‘Anchorage’) had grown up round the seventh-century church of St Amand on the banks of the Scheldt. There were a few isolated settlements on the sand-dunes, such as the abbey of Middleburg on Walcheren dating from 1120, or the hunting-lodge recently built at s’Gravenhaage or ‘Count’s Hedge’ in 1242. A number of fishing villages had found a precarious foothold in the lee of the dunes. Several of these had reached the status of a formal chartered city—Dordrecht (1220), Haarlem (1245), Delft (1246), and Alkmaar (1254). But none of them contained a fraction of the teeming population of the great textile cities of neighbouring Flanders. For centuries, the bishop of Utrecht exercised the main religious and secular authority. The delta ports had long served as staging posts on the costal trade.

Land reclamation was an ancient and improving art. Holland’s characteristic terpen or artificial ‘mounds’, on which houses could be safely built above flood level, dated from time immemorial. They had been mentioned by Pliny. The earliest dikes of the zeewering or ‘sea-defences’ dated from the eighth or ninth century. River dikes began to spread after the perfection of the sluice-gate in the eleventh century. The construction of polders or enclosed ‘stake fields’ depended on a sophisticated system of drainage which was not mastered until c.1150. The dikes had to be built, with back-breaking labour, round lines of stakes driven deep into the soft ground, then filled with rubble and stones and planted with anchor grass. Once enclosed, the field had to be repeatedly flooded with fresh water over ten or fifteen years and repeatedly drained to disperse the salt. Only then could the rich alluvial soil begin to repay the efforts. But its fertility was proverbial: as well as the meat, wool, and leather of sheep and cattle that grazed on the sea-turf pastures, it provided both the life-support system for dense colonization and an abundance of produce for export to the neighbouring towns.

In the thirteenth century the polderization of Holland was in its infancy: it could only nibble at the very edge of the marshes. Before the introduction of wind-driven water-balers, there was no efficient means of draining large enclosures. Immense damage was to be done by the terrible St Elizabeth flood of 1421, which drowned 72 villages and 10,000 people and negated the progress of two centuries. The greater part of the land below sea-level requiring permanent drainage could not be touched until the invention c.1550 of windmills with rotating turrets, which could pump non-stop, irrespective of wind direction. No schedule for reclaiming the whole of Holland existed before the Land Reclamation Act of 1918. Another catastrophic flood was needed in 1953 before the grand Delta Plan (1957–86) was brought in to regulate all the rivers and fill the channels to the sea. Eight hundred years of dogged struggle against the elements cannot have failed to leave its mark on the people involved. Some historians have been tempted to see it as the determinant factor in the Dutch character.

The building of the dams marked a special stage in this long history. It launched a system of inland waterways whose operation could be controlled by the keepers of the sluices. Since seagoing ships could not easily pass the narrow locks, entrepôts sprang up round the dams, where shipping could exchange cargoes with those of smaller river barges. Schiedam-Rotterdam and Amsterdam both grew from the junction of the sea trade and the river trade. They would not grow to pre-eminence, however, without a whole series of extraneous developments which resulted in the demise of their principal competitors. Foremost among these, and at a much later date, was the wholly arbitrary ruin of Antwerp, effected through the forcible closure of the Scheldt 1648–1863. (See p. 567.)

Holland’s strategic location on the western frontier of the Empire ensured a high degree of political involvement. It had once formed the northern segment of the middle kingdom of ‘Lotharingia’. It spent a dozen years in the early tenth century in the sphere of West Francia, before passing definitively into the eastern, imperial sphere in 925. For the next 300 years, as part of the ‘Duchy of Lower Lorraine’, it was drawn into the endless rivalries of the feudal princes and their manœuvrings between the Empire and the rising kingdom of France.

The counts of Holland traced their pedigree to Dirk I (Dietrich, Thierri, or Theodoric), the descendant of Vikings who had established a base in the delta in the ninth century. Dirk I had been granted lands near Haarlem in 922, in a district then called Kennemerland, where he founded the Benedictine monastery of Egmont. The family’s fortunes were assured after 1018 when Count Dirk III, having set up unauthorized tolls on the lower Rhine, repulsed the Duke of Lorraine in a famous battle on the dikes. Dirk III first used the name of Holland in his title. Thereafter, secure in their castle at Haarlem, the counts engaged in ceaseless feudal strife. Holland was one of a dozen counties whose interests straddled the imperial frontier. Neither the Emperor nor the king of France could exert a permanent influence, except by proxy through the shifting combinations of their vassals. For practical purposes the feudal lords of the ill-defined Low Countries, the Nederlanden, which stretched from the Rhineland to Picardy, fought it out among themselves. By doing so, they were gradually creating a region with a separate identity and with a destiny that was neither German nor French.

Within this circle, Holland must be counted one of the lesser lights. The mighty bishops of Utrecht and Liège, the dukes of Lorraine and Brabant, and the neighbouring county of Flanders were all much more substantial. Holland’s successful contest with Flanders over the control of the islands of Zeeland had run for centuries until the Peace of Brussels in 1253. Her subjugation of the fierce inhabitants of Frisia or Friesland, who remained pagan until Charlemagne’s time, had been concluded more by the inundations of the sea than by successful conquest. Together with the excess population of the crowded Flemish cities, distressed Frieslanders supplied one of the largest contingents of emigrants who were colonizing the lands of Germany’s eastern marches.

None the less, the counts of Holland were men of considerable political substance. William I (r. 1205–22) fought at Bouvines on the imperial side and was taken prisoner by the French. Like his forebear, who had taken Lisbon from the Saracens, he was a devoted crusader. He died in Egypt after participating in the siege of Damietta. William II (r. 1234–56) aspired to the supreme imperial dignity. Succeeding as a minor, he was raised a son of the Church by his guardian, the Bishop of Utrecht, and found himself propelled into the higher realms of Pope Innocent IV’s attempts to depose the Hohenstaufen. (See p. 353.) In 1247 he was crowned at Aachen under ecclesiastical sponsorship as King, or anti-King, of the Romans. Married to a Guelph duchess, and allied to the powerful confederation of Rhineland cities, he briefly won the upper hand in Germany’s internecine politics. In January 1256 he went home to Holland to deal with a local problem in Frisia before proceeding to his coronation as Emperor in Rome. A crack in the ice, through which armoured horse and armoured rider sank on impact, put an end to a promising career. But for the accident, the Hollander would probably have become Holy Roman Emperor.

Floris V (r. 1256–96), the current Count and the grandson of William II, was to be the penultimate incumbent of Holland’s first dynasty. He was the ruler who finally put an end to the Frisian troubles, and who won the acclaim of his lowliest subjects. Faced by an insurrection of peasants, who joined forces with the mob of Utrecht, he undertook to curb the arbitrary rule of his bailiffs and to introduce a code of written laws. He was remembered in legend as der keerlen God, ‘the Peasant’s God’. For many years he was to enjoy a close alliance with Edward I of England, to whose court he sent his son and heir to be educated and married. This was Count Floris, the hero of Holland’s ‘Rhyming Chronicle’, the Rijmkronik van Melis Stoke: 

Tgraefscap ende dat jonghe kynt
Daer wonder of ghesciede sint.

(So ended the countship of the young man [who] was the wonder of history.)

Aleida van Henegouven was the aunt and guardian of the young Floris V. As Regent of Holland during the Count’s minority, she was one of several powerful women who held the reins of state in the Netherlands. Of these, the most prominent was her neighbour, the extraordinary Countess Margaret of Flanders. Known as Zwarte Griet or ‘Black Meg’, Countess Margaret (d. 1280) was caught up in all the feudal fortunes and misfortunes that one could imagine. She was the younger daughter of Count Baldwin IX, the leader of the Fourth Crusade, who took over the Latin Empire of the East. Like her sister Joanna she had been born in Constantinople, whence she had been brought home after her father’s death and, together with Joanna, made a pawn of the politics of Innocent III. As a child, she watched her sister married off to Fernando of Portugal, nephew of the King of France, whilst she herself was given as a child bride to Bouchard d’Avesnes, Lord of Hainault. After the battle of Bouvines, which sent Fernando to the dungeons of the Louvre, she saw her sister married for a second time to Thomas of Savoy, whilst she herself, on the Pope’s insistence, was divorced and remarried to a French knight, Guy de Dampierre. By the time in 1244 that she succeeded Joanna as Countess both of Hainault and of Flanders, she was mother of five sons by two marriages, and already one of the prime survivors of her day. She could not prevent her two eldest sons fighting over her inheritance and was obliged to accept a famous mediation of St Louis, who awarded Hainault to Jean d’Avesnes and Flanders to Guillaume de Dampierre. She would outlive them all.

Flanders, which was torn by the rivalry of Bruges and Ghent, was none the less the richest prize in Netherlands politics. Its fate could not be a matter of indifference to Holland. In the past the counts of Flanders had balanced between the Empire and France and had accepted fiefs from both sides, creating groups of territories known as Kroon-Vlaanderen and Rijks-Vlaanderen. Since Bouvines, however, French influence had been rising steeply, and would lead to a full-scale French occupation. In 1265 the struggle between Pope and Emperor was fast approaching its nadir. The Papacy had blocked the cause of the Hohenstaufen after Frederick II’s death; and the interregnum in the Empire, which Count William’s accident left unresolved, was sinking into ever deeper complications. 1257 had brought a double election: one meeting of the imperial Electors produced a decision in favour of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, the younger brother of Henry III of England, a second meeting decided for Alfonso, King of Castile. In contrast to Alfonso, who stayed at home in Toledo, Earl Richard did proceed to his coronation as King of the Romans. But neither of the rival candidates could exercise any authority over Germany as a whole.

Richard of Cornwall (1209–72) was one of the wealthiest and best-connected men of his age.46 His possession of the Cornish stannaries was worth a second earldom, whilst his management of the Mint and of England’s reformed coinage brought him a fabulous cash income. Through his financial adviser, Abraham of Berkhamsted, he was able to make loans to kings and cardinals; and he had no difficulty in finding the 28,000 marks which greased the machinery of his German election. Lord of Corfe, and of Wallingford and Berkhamsted, he had dabbled with the baronial opposition in England, and was known as one of the very few barons who actually spoke English. As titular Count of Poitou, he held strong interests in Gascony, where he had served as royal governor. He had led a Crusade to Acre, but had used the expedition as an occasion for making the personal acquaintance of his two brothers-in-law, first of St Louis in Paris and then of Frederick II in Sicily. He had good relations with the Low Countries, whence Floris V had hastened to London to pay him homage in person. He was due to take as his third wife, after Isabella Marshal and Sanchia of Provence, Beatrice Countess of Falkenburg in Brabant.

For most of 1265, however, Earl Richard’s fortunes were at a low ebb. Three visits to Germany had given him no benefit. What is more, having been caught up in his brother’s baronial war and captured by de Montfort’s men, he was now a prisoner in Kenilworth Castle. His inglorious adventures after the Battle of Lewes, where he hid in a windmill, gave birth to one of England’s earliest political satires:

The King of Alemaigne wende do fill wel
He saisede the mulne for a castel,
With hare sharpe swerds he grounde the stel
He wende that the sayles were mangonel to helpe Wyndesor.
Richard, thah thou be ever trichard
trichen shalt thou never more.

At that juncture, the royal party was well and truly hated in England. Simon de Montfort, the protector genus Angliae, was seen as a popular champion against oppression:

Il est apelé de Montfort,
Il est el mond et si est fort
Si ad grant chevalerie.
Ce voir, et je m’acort,
Il eime droit, et hete Ie tort.
Si avera la mestene.

(He is called de Montfort / He is our protector (mund) and is so strong (fort) I And has such great chivalry. / Look here, I quite agree, / He loves right and hates wrong. / Thus he will have the mastery.)

When Simon was killed at Evesham on 4 August 1265, his companions in the emplacement on Green Hill died with him to a man; he was mourned as a saint and a martyr.

That year also saw a papal election. Clement IV was a Frenchman who, as Guy Foulques, had once had a wife and children and had served as legal consultant to St Louis. Rome and parts of northern Italy were still so sympathetic to the Hohenstaufen that Clement, who had been away on legation to England, was obliged to travel home disguised as a monk and to take up residence in Perugia. From there he arranged for Charles of Anjou to be invested with the kingdom of Sicily and Naples, and for finance to be found for the brutal campaigns that were to put an end first to the Emperor’s bastard son, Manfred, and then to Manfred’s nephew, the young Conradin. From Perugia, he sent a bull to the Abbey of Egmont in Holland confirming its ancient rights and immunities.49

Like the Civil War in England, the imperial interregnum in Germany reduced the country to chaos:

Every floodgate of anarchy was opened; prelates and barons extended their domains by war; robber-knights infested the roads and the rivers; the misery of the weak, the tyranny and violence of the strong were such as had not been seen for centuries … The Roman Empire ought now to have been suffered to expire.50

Less traditional historians do not see the Empire’s distress quite so drastically. The absence of an Emperor gave the signal for the rise of several regional and city states, which were destined to play a prominent role in European history. The Netherlands, among others, prospered in the shadow of the Empire’s weakness.

Holland, however, was the main focus neither of politics of the Netherlands nor of the Dutch language. Various forms of proto-Middle Dutch were spoken right through the Low Countries as far west as Kortrijk (Courtrai) and Rijsel (Lille). French was dominant in Hainault, Liege, and Namur and in the speech of the nobility in general. Low German overlapped on the eastern borders in Guelders. But the greatest pool of Dutch-speakers was undoubtedly contained in the cities of Flanders. Dialectical nuances between Vlaams and Hollandisch were not marked. Holland itself was still engaged in assimilating Frisian, Frankish, and Saxon elements. Frisian in particular, which was the closest of the Germanic idioms to English, was still strong in north Holland and the islands. The establishment of Holland as the home of standard Dutch, or Nederlands, was the work of a much later age.

Dutch literature, too, was largely written in Flanders. Thirteenth-century Holland did produce a number of valuable texts, including the Egmont Chronicle and an animal fantasy Van den Vos Reinarde (c.1270), by a certain Willem. But the leading names, such as Jacob van Maerlent (c.1235–71), author of Alexander’s Feasts (1258) and born at Bruges, were Flemings.

Foreign trade flowed as yet quite feebly. Dordrecht, where a castle had been built to owerawe ships plying between the Rhineland and the North Sea, was the only port of substance. It had contacts with England, and hopes of drawing the lucrative English staple from the more prosperous Flemish ports along the coast. There were no regular links with the Baltic, or with Russia.51 Social conditions in Holland did not conform to the standard structures of the ‘age of feudalism’. Feudal institutions, in fact, were weak. Serfdom was rare beyond the estates of the Church, and settlements of free peasants and independent fisherfolk were common. The nobles, though well integrated into the practices and mores of knighthood and landownership, were not subordinated in any systematic way to feudal superiors. The cities, though small, could look to the example of the nearby Rhineland, and were set to play a preponderant role. Religious life in Holland was also somewhat untypical. The bishop of Utrecht was losing much of his former power, and did not exercise the same degree of secular and legal authority that flourished in the neighbouring diocese of Liège. Despite a number of new foundations, neither the friars nor the new monastic orders had impressed their presence very strongly. Frisia was a notorious refuge of pagan survivals; rebellious mystic sects were an established fact.

Any description of Holland’s early history belies the popular misconception that Europe’s later nations must already have existed in embryo in the medieval period. The thirteenth century marks the mid-point of the span which separates our contemporary age from the so-called ‘Birth of Europe’ amidst the ruins of the Classical World. One might have expected that the national communities, which came to dominate the end of the story, would at least be discernible, albeit in a half-formed stage of development. Yet this was not so. In the case of the Low Countries, familiar terms such as ‘Holland’, ‘Dutch’, and ‘Netherlands’ all possessed different connotations from those which they later acquired. The modern myth about the permanent union of a ‘nation’ and its ‘soil’ was plainly irrelevant In the thirteenth century Holland was not the core of a developing Dutch nation. Indeed, much of the soil which 300 and 400 years later would form the central territorial base of Dutch national consciousness had not yet been deposited.

Most of Europe in 1265 displayed the same lack of recognizable national communities. In the middle of the Christian Reconquista, the Iberian states of Portugal, Castile, and Aragón had little awareness of a common Spain. In the year of Dante’s birth, the defeat of the Hohenstaufen was putting an end to the dream of a united Italy. In the midst of the Mongol invasions and the ‘age of fragmentation’, a united Poland was no more than a memory. There was no longer any Rus’, let alone a sense of Russia. A kingdom of England did exist, on the ruins of the Plantagenet empire; but it still had stronger connections with the Continent, in Gascony and Aquitaine, than with Wales or Ireland. Its French-speaking Anglo-Norman aristocracy did not yet share a common culture with the English people, and the baronial opposition was led by Continental adventurers like de Montfort. There was no concept of Britishness whatsoever. The kingdom of Scotland was still disputing its territory with the Norwegians, who had just invaded the northern isles. Under St Louis, the kingdom of France now stretched from the Channel to the Mediterranean. But it was an amalgam of the most diverse elements that would have to disintegrate before they could be reconstituted for a second time as a more cohesive whole. As the interregnum showed, the German Empire had collapsed in all but name. It was hopelessly rent by the competing interests of its German and its Italian territories on either side of the Alps. There was no such country as Switzerland; and the Habsburgs were yet to move to Austria. The Prussia of the Teutonic Knights was in the earliest decades of its career; but it bore no resemblance to the later Prussia of the Hohenzollerns (who in 1265 were still ensconced in their native castle in Swabia). In Scandinavia, Norway had broken away from Danish control; but the break was not due to last. The Swedes, like the Lithuanians, were embroiled in multinational conquests in the East. Bohemia under Ottokar II (r. 1253–78) was at the pinnacle of its glory, having just annexed Austria and Styria. Hungary was in a state of collapse, following the two Mongol raids, and was facing the end of the native árpád dynasty. The Byzantine Empire, Europe’s oldest polity, had recovered Constantinople four years before, and had driven out the Latin usurpers to their toeholds in Greece. None of these entities was destined to survive into modern times.

It would be problematical, therefore, to talk of national states at any point in the thirteenth century. But if national identities were judged to be developing effectively in any place at the time, it could only have been in some of the small countries who had successfully segregated themselves from their neighbours. Portugal was a candidate for this, as was Denmark, and, in the Balkans, Serbia and Bulgaria. Both Serbia and Bulgaria had re-established their independence from Byzantium in the 1180s. More importantly, they both created their own national Orthodox Churches with their own patriarchs—Bulgaria in 1235, Serbia in 1346. This step gave them a powerful instrument for forging a separate identity, for educating a national élite, for political publicity, and for the sanctification of national institutions. It was a step which none of the countries of Latin Christendom could take until the Reformation, and which Muscovite Russia did not take until 1589. It strengthened the bonds of these two Slav peoples whose cohesion would be tested through 500 years of Ottoman rule.

For Europe was living out its last few decades before the Ottomans, and the second great Muslim advance. The silk road to the East was still open. Christian travellers were reporting on their journeys to Tartary. In the year that a ‘Venice of the North’ was founded on the Amstel, Marco Polo set out from the Rialto for China.

Dutch historians, like everyone else, have had to contend with the habit of reading history backwards. When national histories were first formulated in the nineteenth century, the Low Countries had just been definitively divided into the kingdoms of Belgium and Holland; and it was accepted form to maintain that separate Flemish and Dutch communities had been present from the earliest times. Great pains were taken to show that the medieval churches of Sluis, for example, on one side of the Scheldt, were pearls of the Hollandish style, while the churches of Damme on the other bank were treasures of the Flemish heritage. It took a great leap of the imagination for historians to demonstrate that separate Dutch and Belgian traditions did not pre-date the Dutch Revolt of 1566–1648 (see PP- 534–9) which put an arbitrary stop on the previous growth of a shared Netherlands consciousness. It was more difficult to suggest in the early chapters of the story that little sense of a common identity existed, and still more that Holland might not have lain at the heart of Dutchness. There were many more twists in the tale, under Burgundian and Habsburg rule, and many fundamental shifts in economic and demographic patterns, before the ‘Land of the Dams’ could assume its modern form and function. After all, it was not until 1593 that Carolus Clusius (1526–1609), Professor of Medicine at Leiden, received the very first tulip bulbs from Turkey and planted them in the fertile flowerfields between Leiden and Haarlem.

In all these matters of nationality, the key element is consciousness. As one Dutch historian explained, nationality can be observed neither in the blood, nor in the soil, nor even on the tongue:

Nationality exists in the minds of men,… its only conceivable habitat… Outside men’s minds there can be no nationality, because nationality is a manner of looking at oneself not an entity an sich. Common sense is able to detect it, and the only human discipline that can describe and analyse it is psychology … This awareness, this sense of nationality, this national sentiment, is more than a characteristic of the nation. It is nationhood itself.52

In the thirteenth century, in the midst of the feudal strife, it is very doubtful whether the local patriotism of Holland could have started to merge into any sense of general solidarity with the Low Countries as a whole. Three hundred years before the stirring and formative experiences of the Dutch Revolt, it is certain that the half-formed northern provinces, such as Holland, could not have possessed much common consciousness vis-à-vis the southern provinces. One can only conclude that the Dutch nation did not then exist. This is an object lesson for the whole of medieval Europe.

After which one may be tempted to enquire as to where, if not in nations, the thirteenth-century consciousness actually resided. The only answer must be ‘there was what there was’. Medieval Europeans were conscious of belonging to their native village or town, and to a group possessing a local language whose members could communicate without recourse to Latin or Greek. They were aware of belonging to a body of men and women who acknowledged the same feudal lord; to a social estate, which shared the same privileges; above all, to the great corporation of Christendom. Beyond that, as the greatest son of the 1260s would soon describe, one could only wait for Death and the Day of Judgement. Then at last one could learn to which of the really important social groups one belonged—to the passengers on the ferry of the Damned, to the company of penitents sailing for Purgatory, or perhaps to the choirs of Paradise.

* Robert le Bougre. Thanks to their Bogumil connections, the Cathars were widely known as boúgars a corruption of ‘Bulgars’. Also, since the perfecti practised severe sexual celibacy, they were widely accused of sodomy. Hence the evolution in the meaning of‘buggery’.