V
MEDIUM
The Middle Age, c.750–1270
THERE is an air of immobility about many descriptions of the medieval world. The impression is created by emphasizing the slow pace of technological change, the closed character of feudal society, and the fixed, theocratic perceptions of human life. The prime symbols of the period are the armoured knight on his lumbering steed; the serfs tied to the land of their lord’s demesne; and cloistered monks and nuns at prayer. They are made to represent physical immobility, social immobility, intellectual immobility.
Medium Aevum, ‘the Middle Age’, was a term first used by devout Christians who saw themselves living in the interval between Christ’s first and Second Coming. Much later it was taken up for different purposes. Renaissance scholars began to talk in the fifteenth century of the ‘Middle Age’ as the interval between the decline of antiquity and the revival of classical culture in their own times. For them, the ancient world stood for high civilization; the Middle Age represented a descent into barbarism, parochiality, religious bigotry. During the Enlightenment, when the virtues of human reason were openly lauded over those of religious belief, ‘medievalism’ became synonymous with obscurantism and backwardness. Since then, of course, as the ‘Modern Age’ which followed the Middle Age was itself fading into the past, new terms had to be invented to mark the passage of time. The medieval period has been incorporated into the fourfold convention which divides European history into ancient, medieval, modern, and now contemporary sections. By convention also, the medieval period is often subdivided into early, high, and late phases, creating several successive Middle Ages. Of course, people whom later historians refer to as ‘medieval’ had no inkling of that designation.
Unfortunately, there are no clear lines which mark the end of the ancient world or the beginning of modern times. The start of the medieval period has been fixed at any number of points from the conversion of Constantine onwards. Its end has variously been fixed at 1453, at 1493, at 1517, or even, by those who use their own definition of feudalism as the touchstone of medievality, at 1917. Almost all medievalists would agree, therefore, that the label which defines their subject is unsatisfactory. Many who base their views on a knowledge of Western Europe alone would stress the contrast between the destructive tendencies of the early medieval phase and the constructive tendencies of the later phase. In this scheme, the ‘Dark Ages’ of the fifth to eleventh centuries are characterized by the progressive dismemberment of the Roman world; the turning-point is reached with the so-called ‘twelfth-century renaissance’; and the peak of ‘high’ medieval civilization is reached in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These distinctions bear little relation to the East, where the Roman Empire survived until 1453, and where no ‘renaissance’ in the Western sense was ever experienced.
Most would agree, however, that the unifying feature of the medieval world is to be found in organized Christianity. Here they would accord with the people of medieval Europe, who, if asked, would have seen themselves as Christians, living in the Christian era and in the Christian part of the earth. Yet Christendom itself was an elastic concept. It contracted and expanded over the centuries in response to the wars with Islam and the campaigns against the pagans. It was never exactly coterminous with the Peninsula of ‘Europe’. The Christendom known to Stephen II, when he crossed the Alps in 753, was a very different place from the Christendom of 1453, when the Turks scaled the walls of Constantinople.
The vacuum left by the decline of the Roman Empire was filled by the growing awareness of Christendom, not just as a religious community but also as a coherent political entity. Though the Roman Empire ultimately perished, its religion triumphed. The spiritual and temporal leaders of Christianity gradually assumed the mantle of the Caesars. In the West, where the Empire first crumbled, it was the Bishop of Rome who conceived the notion of a new order predicated on the joint authority of the Latin Church and a Catholic Emperor. ‘The Papacy’, wrote Thomas Hobbes, ‘is no other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.’ The chosen instrument of the Papacy was found in the new Caesars or ‘Kaisers’ of Germany. In the East, where the Roman Empire survived far longer, the notion of a substitute order, based on the authority of the Greek Church and of a new Orthodox Emperor, had to await the emergence of the Caesars or ‘Tsars’ of Moscow.
In this light, if the central theme of the Middle Ages is taken to be the reorganization of Christendom into new imperial systems, a clear chronological framework emerges. The first step may be seen in the coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day in the year 800, the last step in the definitive adoption of the title of Tsar by Ivan III, Grand Duke of Moscow, in 1493.
From an early stage, however, the growing community of Christendom was divided against itself. Though the Latin and the Greek Churches shared all their basic beliefs, they often regarded each other as aliens. Though impartial observers might see them as two variants of the same faith, like the Sunnis and the Shiahs of the Muslim world, they were more conscious of their differences than their commonality. In the first millennium they maintained at least a façade of unity; in the second millennium they abandoned the façade. The old crack opened wide after the schism of 1054. Here was proof that even the foundations of Christendom were subject to movement.
750–1054
From the eighth century onwards, faltering thoughts about a new political order were stimulated by continuing depredations from beyond the fringe of Christendom. The foundation of the Empire of Charlemagne in 800, of the Holy Roman Empire from 962, and eventually of the Tsardom of Moscow can only be understood in conjunction with the activities of the Vikings, the Magyars, the Mongols, and the Turks.
The Vikings or ‘Northmen’ ravaged the northern coasts for more than 200 years. They were the product of overpopulation in the remote fiords of Scandinavia, whose ‘rowmen’ took to their longships for plunder, trade, mercenary service, and sheer adventure. From c.700 parties of Vikings would raid isolated settlements in the British Isles or Frisia before sailing home at the end of each season. They ransacked Lindisfarne in 793 and lona in 795 [IONA]. From the middle of the ninth century, however, huge Viking camps were set up to act as bases for more protracted campaigns of pillage. In several instances these camps led to permanent settlement. The Danish Vikings, for example, created one such ‘great army’ at the mouth of the Seine, from which they repeatedly looted the defenceless cities of northern France. They captured ports such as Rouen and Nantes, whilst sailing off to Portugal (844), to the Balearic Islands, even to Provence and Tuscany (859–62). In 851 they invaded England, fanning out through the eastern half of the country. From 866 the ‘Danelaw’ was established from Northumbria to East Anglia. The struggle between the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes dominated the next 150 years of England’s history. In 911, tradition holds that the Northmen of the Seine were permanently settled under Rollo, thereby creating ‘Normandy’.
The Norwegian Vikings concentrated on the outer islands. They occupied the Orkneys and Shetlands in the eighth century, the Faroes, the Hebrides, and eastern Ireland in the ninth. Their major colony, Iceland, was settled from 874. Dublin was founded in 988. They discovered Greenland; and in all probability, under Eric the Red, they sailed on to North America, which they called Vinland. [EIRIK] The Swedish Vikings operated throughout the Baltic. They established fortified camps at Wolin on the Oder, at Truso on the Vistula, and at Novgorod, whence they penetrated the rivers of the Bay of Riga and the Gulf of Finland. In the ninth century they took hold of the overland route between the Baltic and the Black Sea. Known as Varangians, they controlled the Dnieper, and appeared in Constantinople, [DIRHAM] [FUTHARK]
In the final period, adventurers of Viking origin, who had acquired a veneer of the culture of their adopted countries, created a number of new political states.
Map 12. Europe, c. AD 900
Rurik the Varangian and his sons organized the first durable principality of the eastern Slavs at Novgorod and Kiev, c.860–80. Knut the Dane or ‘Canute the Great’ (r. 1016–35) was lord of a vast North Sea empire joining England with Denmark (see p. 308). Robert Guiscard, the Norman, sailed to southern Italy in 1059 (see p. 336). William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, conquered the kingdom of England in 1066 (see p. 339). Norman rule was destined to last longer in Sicily and in England than in Normandy itself, [DING]
DIRHAM
ON 12 May AD 922, a caravan walked into the Bulgar city of Suvar on the Volga. It had been travelling for more than three months from the port of Jurjan on the Caspian Sea. It was led by an Arab merchant, Ibn Fadlhãn, who wrote an account of his travels.1 It is one small incident in the history of commercial contacts between Eastern Europe and the Arab states of Central Asia over five centuries. Ibn Fadlhãn was coming to buy furs; and there is no doubt that he was carrying a plentiful supply of dirhams to pay for his purchases.
The dirham or dirhem was a coin of pure silver weighing 2.97 grammes, and worth one-tenth of a dinar. It was minted both in North Africa and in Central Asia under various dynasties. It was standard currency in Eastern Europe in the era before local mints existed. Hoards of dirhams have been found all over European Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic States, Sweden, and northern Poland. The largest of them contained over 50,000 coins. Buried by their owners in times of insecurity, they sometimes remained uncollected until found by modern archaeologists and treasure-hunters. They can be dated quite precisely from the date of the newest coin in any particular lot.
Analysis of dirham hoards indicates four recognizable periods. In the first period, c.800–25, the hoards contain Abbasid dirhams, predominantly from North Africa. They may well reflect Khazar-Arab trade links via the Mediterranean [KHAZARIA] In the second period, 825–905, the North African issues disappear, and are replaced by Central Asian coins. In the third period, 905–60, the hoards still consist overwhelmingly of Sãmãnid issues, but are joined by large numbers of Buwayhid and Ziyarid issues.2
In the Viking Age, when Swedish Vikings controlled the Baltic-Dnieper route, dirhams were taken all over the north, [FUTHARK] [RUS’] Important finds have been made in Sweden, and especially on the island of Gotland.3 Indeed, as Ibn Fadlhãn recorded when he encountered a party of Swedes, the possession of dirhams had become a matter of status and public ostentation:
‘I saw the [Swedes] when they landed and camped beside the Volga. I never saw statelier men. They are as tall as palm-trees, ruddy-cheeked, and with red hair. They wear neither kirtle nor caftan, but the men have a rough cloak which they throw to one side, leaving their hands free …
Fastened on the breasts of the women is a capsule of iron, copper, silver or gold according to the wealth of the husband. In the capsule is a ring, and attached to it, a knife … Round their necks, they wear gold and silver chains. For when a man owns 10,000 dirhems, he has one chain made for his wife; for 20,000, she has two chains. Thus [an extra] chain is added [to the wife’s neck] for each 10,000 dirhems that the husband possesses.’
The import of Arab silver to Eastern Europe faltered in the late tenth and ended in the early eleventh century. The latest Sãmãnid dirham found in Sweden dates from 969, in Russia from 1015. This used to be attributed to a ‘silver crisis’ in Central Asia. But other factors were at work. The end of the re-export of Arab silver from Rus’ to Sweden coincides with the appearance of silver deniers from Western Europe. By the end of the eleventh century, Arab coins had been totally supplanted. The details may be obscure; but the numismatic evidence clearly supports developments known from other sources, namely the reorientation of the Baltic trade and the rise of Novgorod.
The Magyars were the last of the nomads to colonize central Europe. Descendants of the Ugrian branch of the Finno-Ugrian peoples, their earliest known cradle-land lay east of the Urals in the valleys of the Irtysh and Ob. They parted company with their Finnic kinsfolk in the third millenniumBC. Thenceforth they occupied successive stations on the southern steppes, gradually adapting themselves to the nomadic life, first in ‘Magna Hungaria’ between the Kama and Ural rivers, later in ‘Lebedia’ north of the Sea of Azov, and finally in the land of Etelkőz or ‘mesopotamia’ between the Dnieper and Dniester (see Appendix III, p. 1240). On the steppes of the first millennium, the Magyars were the neighbours of the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Bulgars, Khazars, Uzi, and Pechenegs. They were already divided into their seven tribes: Nyék, Kűrtgyarmat, Tarján, Jenő’, Kér, Keszi, and Magyar—the last name being later applied to them all. Byzantine sources speak of their trading in slaves through the Black Sea ports.
The Magyars’ decisive move was made at the end of the ninth century. The steppe peoples had been in commotion for several decades. The Arabs dispersed the Uzi and stole their cattle; the Uzi did the same to the Pechenegs. In 894 the Pechenegs made common cause with the Bulgarian Tsar, and together they fell on the Magyars. The time had come for what the Magyars themselves call the hon-foglolás, ‘the occupation of the fatherland’. Overwhelmed by their neighbours, they decided to migrate to the west. For the first time their horsemen, who in recent years had lent their services both to the Franks and the Byzantines, did not return to Etelkoz. Instead, with Arpad at their head, they led the long trains of their people over the Verecke Pass in the Carpathians. It was the spring of 895 at the latest. Perhaps 20,000 warriors and 400,000 tribesfolk had come to found the land of the Magyars on the plains of ‘Hungaria’. [CSABA] [SHAMAN]
The Mongols, or ‘Tartars’, commanded the greatest of all the nomadic empires. Centred on the arid steppes of central Asia, their fortunes waxed and waned; but they directly impinged on the affairs of the West on two separate occasions. Genghis Khan (r. 1206–27), starting from Karakorum, conquered a territory which stretched from the Pacific to the Black Sea, from Korea to Crimea (see p. 364). The renewer of the Mongol empire, Timur or Tamerlane (1336–1405), starting from Samarkand, mastered an area somewhat more to the south, from Delhi to the Aegean. Indirectly, it was the Mongols who set another Central Asian people in motion. The Turks originated in Turkestan, whence they were displaced in the eighth century and where related peoples still live. They were destined to appear on the horizons of the West first with the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century (see pp. 332–3) and then with the Ottoman Turks in the thirteenth (see p. 386). The story of their epic wanderings encompasses the whole span which in the West separated Charlemagne from the end of the Crusades.
DING
THE custom among Germanic tribes of holding popular assemblies was described by Tacitus: and there is little doubt that they had existed since prehistoric times. The earliest such assembly to enter the historical record, in the ninth-century Legend of Ansgar, was the Ding which met at Birka on the island of Björkö in Sweden. A similar assembly met at a similar period in Denmark.
Iceland’s national assembly, the Althing, came into being in AD 930 under the Law Rock by the lake at Thingvellir. Thereafter, it met annually ‘after ten weeks of summer’ and was attended by the island’s thirty-six clan chiefs and by their chosen delegates or thingmen, who elected the Lawspeaker. It appointed judges, passed laws, and made executive decisions, adopting the principle of majority voting from 1130. Each year, it was preceded by the Maytime farthings or ‘regional assemblies’ of the island’s four quarters, and was followed by the leid—a meeting when the populace was informed of decisions taken. It was the centrepiece of Iceland’s ‘free state’, which continued until the ‘Old Treaty’ of 1264 and the Norwegian takeover.1
The Manx Assembly on the Isle of Man, the Tynwald, like that of the Faroes, dates from a similar early period, [FAROE]
Nordic democracy put special emphasis on local assemblies. Every Swedish province had its ding, like Iceland’s farthings, in each of the country’s twelve jurisdictions. Denmark had three landlings, and Norway its lögthings. At the lowest level in Iceland, a system of hieppar or ‘farmers’ gatherings’ functioned from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries. These traditions greatly modified the ambitions of Nordic kingship, and obstructed Scandinavian political union. When the Nordic countries did eventually enter the Union of Kalmar (see p. 431), it was for dynastic reasons that did not last. The Charter of Rights which was forced on the Danish King Erik Glipping in 1282, and the Swedish equivalent of 1319, were more extensive than England’s Magna Carta. All had their roots in a much older political culture.2
Nor was the influence of Nordic democracy confined to Scandinavia. It had an impact everywhere the Vikings went—in England, in Scotland, in Russian Novgorod, and very probably in Poland, where the same legal right of rebellion took root (see p. 555). Although the Scandinavian countries were due to experience an era of absolute monarchy, the tradition of local democracy may help to explain the strength of constitutionalism and representative government in modern times.
The empire of Charlemagne consummated the alliance between the Roman Papacy and the growing kingdom of the Franks. It was an ephemeral affair, barely surviving its founder’s death and disappearing completely within a century. None the less, its impact was profound. Charlemagne, or Charles the Great (r. 768–814), great-grandson of Charles Martel, united the two halves of his forebears’ realm, Neustria and Austrasia, in a vast territory from the Atlantic to the Danube, from the Netherlands to Provence. After fifty-three campaigns and a lifetime in the saddle, he succeeded in extending that realm in all directions: to the Kingdom of the Lombards south of the Alps (773–4); to Saxony (775–804), Bavaria (788), and Carinthia (799); to the March of Brittany (786); and to the Spanish March across the Pyrenees (795–7). Having assumed the title of ‘King of the Franks and Lombards’, and confirmed the grant of the Exarchate of Ravenna to the Papacy, he had clearly outstripped the rival chieftains of his day, and was looking for suitable recognition. For its part, the Papacy had severed its links with the Emperor in Constantinople and was looking for a permanent protector. Pope Leo III (795–816) was tempted to regard the imperial title as vacant after the pathological Empress Irene had seized sole power in Constantinople. Moreover, attacked in Rome by a gang of his predecessor’s relatives who had tried to mutilate him, he was forced to take refuge with Charles in Frankland, whither he had earlier sent the keys of St Peter’s and the banner of Rome, [BRIE]
After Charlemagne’s early years, the western borders of Frankland were not seriously disturbed. The line of the Pyrenees was held against major Muslim incursions (see p. 255); and the Caliphate, though prosperous and populous, was preoccupied with the internal strife of its constituent states. The Frankish position was strengthened by allies among the Christian princes who clung tenaciously to the coastland of northern Iberia, first in the Kingdom of Asturias and then in the later Kingdoms of Leon, Castile, and Navarre. On the southern flank, it was protected by the Christian buffer states which took root in Aragon and in the County of Barcelona. Relative security in the west gave Charlemagne and his successors the chance to turn their attention to problems elsewhere, notably in the east and in Italy, [MADONNA]
The Franco-papal alliance was consummated in 800, during Charles’s fifth journey to Italy. A council of notables had absolved Leo of all crimes, and during Christmas Mass, as Charles rose from prayer before St Peter’s tomb, the Pope slipped an imperial crown on his head. The congregation acclaimed him ‘Caesar’ and ‘Augustus’, and the Pope knelt in homage before him. Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, claims that the coronation occurred spontaneously; in all probability it was carefully rehearsed. In terms of tradition it was entirely irregular: Pope Leo had no recognized right to confer the imperial title, and Charlemagne had no right to receive it. But it happened. Henceforth, there was a Catholic Emperor in the West independent of the Byzantine Empire. The barbaric Frankish kingdom was upgraded, dependent on the Pope for its new status (see Appendix III, p. 1239).[AQUILA][PAPESSA]
BRIE
RETURNING from his campaign against the Lombards in 774, Charlemagne halted on the Plateau de Brie, close to the Abbey of Meaux. The monks served him a Lenten plate of cheese. They insisted that he eat it whole, without removing the crust. Delighted, he promptly ordered two batches of Brie to be sent to Aachen every year. Charlemagne’s secretary, Einhard, recorded a similar incident four years later during the Saracen wars. Stopping in the district of Rouergue in the Midi, the King took an instant liking to the local blue cheese of ewes’ milk that was known and matured since Roman times in the limestone caves at Roquefort.1
Charlemagne’s fine cheeses were matched by a cellar of fine wines. He owned many ouvrées or ‘enclosures’ in the Burgundian vineyard at Aloxe-Corton, whose choicest Grand Cru white, ‘smelling of cinnamon and tasting of gunflint’, is still marketed as CORTON-CHARLEMAGNE.2
Brie de Meaux, one of France’s 500 listed cheeses, dates from the era of early monastic farming. After renneting and airing, the curd is shovelled into a flat, straw-based mould, and left to drain on a sloping stone shelf. Decanted after 24 hours, it is salted, dried, frequently turned, and matured in cellars for 4–7 weeks. The final product measures 37 x 3.5 cm, weighs 3 kg, and will have taken up 23 litres of full-cream milk, preferably from a herd of Normandy cows. It has a golden-roseate crust, a firm, straw-coloured body, and a succulent, ivory âme or ‘centre’—literally ‘the soul’. It should be eaten between thin slices of crusty bread.
For centuries, Brie was shipped along the River Marne to Paris, where the street-sellers shouted ‘Fromage de Brye’. It was a royal favourite with Charjes VIII and Henri IV, but cost the life of Louis XVI, who was caught in the tavern at Varennes through tarrying to eat his cheese. Brie was made internationally famous at the Congress of Vienna, where Metternich pronounced it le prince des fromages—‘the only prince which Talleyrand would never betray’.
The CAP of the European Community is all but killing traditional farmhouse cheese. In 1985, some 6,000 tonnes of Brie ANOC (Appellation Nationale d’Origine Controllée) were produced, as against over 18,000 tonnes of ‘horrific’ industrial Brie.
In August 1792, when many of the monks of Meaux were killed during the revolutionary Terror, one brother, the Abbé Gobert, fled to Normandy en route for England. He stopped long enough in a village near Vimoutiers (Orne) to show a farmer’s wife what he knew about cheese-making. The village was called Camembert.3
MADONNA
OUR Lady of Monserrat is a statue of indeterminate age, though the monastery which houses her shrine on the ‘Saw-Tooth Mountain’ in Catalonia was founded in 975. The small wooden figure, which was carved in a seated position, possibly in Byzantium, is crowned, and holds an orb on one side and the Christ-child on the other. The Child, also crowned, raises the right hand in blessing, whilst proffering a pine-cone in the left. The Madonna’s face, whose elongated features bear a look of utter serenity, is black.1
In 1384 an icon of the Virgin Mother and Child was brought to the Pauline monastery of Jasna Góra, the ‘Bright Mountain’, near the township of Częstochowa in western Poland. It was donated by the Prince of Opole in Silesia. Legend was to hold that it had been painted by St Luke on boards from the Holy Family’s table in Nazareth. More likely, it was copied from a Byzantine original. The head is covered by a dark cape edged with gold, and spangled with fleur-de-lis, and it is crowned beneath a halo. The eyes are half-closed, as if by tears, and a countenance of utter sorrow is emphasized by two long slashes or sabre-cuts which radiate from the right cheek. The face, like that of la Moreneta, is black (see Plate 20).2
There is a Black Madonna at Notre-Dame de Rocamadour, centrepiece of a group of shrines built in the twelfth century into the cliffs of the Gorge d’Alzou in central France. The figure is said to have been carved by St Amadour or Amateur, whom legend links with Zacchaeus the Publican, a disciple of Christ.3 Another tiny icon of a black madonna, of Byzantine origin, graces the altar of the crypt of Notre-Dame du Port in Clermont.4
In Russia, the Black Virgin of Kazan has long been ascribed miracle-working powers. First discovered in 1579, buried in a field, the icon was installed in the Bogoroditsky convent in Kazan, shortly after the city’s conquest by Ivan the Terrible. One copy was taken to Moscow in 1612 to mark the expulsion of the Poles from the Kremlin; another was brought to St Petersburg in 1710 to mark the benediction of Russia’s new capital. A grandiose, neo-classical cathedral, completed by Alexander I, was built to house St Petersburg’s Virgin, which few people knew to be a copy. In 1904 the original icon was stolen from Kazan. It duly reappeared in Western Europe, and was acquired by the Orthodox Church of the USA—thus avoiding the fate of many famous Russian icons which were either destroyed during the Bolshevik Revolution or deposited in state art galleries.5
Monserrat, Częstochowa, Rocamadour, and Kazan are but four of the countless Marian shrines across Europe. In a continent of white faces, the Black Madonnas possess an air of added mystery. La Moreneta, patroness of Catalonia, saw the conversion of Ignatius Loyola. She became a focus of attention during the Napoleonic Wars, when the monastery was destroyed. She is well known in Sicily, in Mexico, and in Bohemia. Wallenstein, the Imperial General, was building a chapel in her honour when he was assassinated. The Matka Boska or ‘Divine Mother’ of Częstochowa, the ‘Queen of Poland’, first attracted pilgrims during the Hussite Wars, before assuming a national role during the seventeenth century (see p. 556). Together with her Lithuanian counterpart, the ‘Matka Boska Ostrobramska’ in Wilno, she is celebrated by Poles in all their churches, from Irkutsk in Siberia to Doylestown (Pennsylvania). The Virgin of Rocamadour was venerated by St Louis in 1245, by Charles le Bel (1324), and by Louis XI (1463). She inspired the Litanie de la Vierge Noire (1936) by Francis Poulenc. The Virgin of Kazan was adopted as the supreme patroness of the Romanov dynasty, a Russian counterpart to the Virgin of Blachernae in Constantinople. Unlike her Catholic counterparts, who receive special adoration during the Feast of the Assumption, her feast-day is held on 8 July (OS).
The cult of the Virgin Mary finds no place in the Bible. It first appears with the doctrine of the Theotokos or ‘God-bearer’ at the Council of Ephesus. It inspired the consecration of S. Maria Maggiore (432) in Rome, of Reims Cathedral about the same time, and of the rededicated Parthenon in Athens. In sixth-century Byzantium it launched the regular celebration of the Feasts of the Annunciation (25 March), the Assumption (15 August), and the Dormition, all favourite themes of iconography. From there, it spread steadily throughout Latin Christendom. In St Mary it presented a divine image of womanhood, the Mater Misericordiae, the Magna Mater, the spotless Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God—an ideal foil for the older Christian fixation with Eve, the sinner, and with Mary Magdalene, the repentant whore. It was vehemently denounced by Protestants, as by modern feminists.6 But it did not find formal acceptance until the dogma of Immaculate Conception in 1854. Demands for recognition of ‘the Co-redemptress’ were rejected at the Second Vatican Council.
Yet the Blessed Virgin does not cease to inspire. She is the foremost subject of Christian art, the recurrent source of mystical visions, [BERNADETTE] [FATIMA], and the recipient of ceaseless prayers [ANGELUS]. The ‘fifteen decades’ of the Rosary are recited in her honour. Since 1568 the Ave Maria or ‘Hail Mary’ has had a permanent place in the Roman Catholic Breviary:
Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee.
Blessed art Thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb.
Holy Mary, Mother of God! Pray for us sinners,
Now and at the hour of our death.
Charlemagne’s kingdom and empire were governed by an itinerant court that journeyed incessantly from one domain to the next; by a number of subordinate courts established in Neustria, Aquitaine, and Lombardy; and by a network of perhaps 300 comitates or ‘counties’, each headed by an imperial lieutenant or ‘Count’. The work of the Emperor’s court was supervised by a staff of clerics, initially by the Arch-Chaplain Fulrad and later by the Emperor’s favourite counsellor, the Northumbrian monk Alcuin. Local bishops were often used to supervise the counts, and missi dominici, ‘royal legates’, toured the realm on fixed circuits. Law and order, and all appointments, were administered in the name of the King. A central silver coinage was introduced, with 240 denarii to the pound. An international executive class, united by royal favour and often by marriage, made its appearance. A series of capitularies, or collected edicts, strove to encourage uniform rules for both Church and State. The tithe was made obligatory. Murder of a priest was made punishable by death. The clergy could only be judged by a court presided over jointly by count and bishop. Pagan cremations were banned. It may have appeared that a new, centralized political order was in the making. In reality, local customs and leaders retained much of their force.
Charlemagne’s court was certainly the focus of continental power and influence. An entry in the royal annals for 798 reveals its far-flung contacts:
A legate came from King Alfonso of Galicia and Asturias, Froia by name, who handed over a tent of marvellous beauty. But at Easter-time the Nordliudi across the Elbe rose in rebellion and seized the royal legates residing amongst them to dispense justice … The king collected an army and defeated them in battle and took hostages. And proceeding to his palace at Aachen, he received a Greek delegation sent from Constantinople. In this year, the star called Mars was not to be seen anywhere in the heavens from July to July. The Balearic Isles were plundered by Moors and Saracens. King Alfonso, who had plundered Lisbon, sent his legates Froia and Basiliscus in winter-time to the Lord King with breastplates, mules and Moorish prisoners as evidence of his victory. Then Christmas and Easter were celebrated in this place by the King.2
It was in the court of Charles the Great that the ancient term of ‘Europe’ was revived. The Carolingians needed a label to describe that section of the world which they dominated, as distinct from the pagan lands, from Byzantium, or from Christendom as a whole. This ‘first Europe’, therefore, was an ephemeral Western concept which lasted no longer than Charles himself.
PAPESSA
ACCORDING to persistent medieval tradition, the throne of St Peter was once occupied by a woman. In the commonest version Pope Leo IV, who died in AD 855, was succeeded by one ‘Johannes Anglicus.’ Leo’s successor had greatly impressed the Curia with learned lectures, having studied in Athens, but two years later caused grave scandal by dying in childbirth in a Roman street. This account can be traced to the work of Martinus Polonus of Troppau OP (c.1200–78), who presented the events as proven fact. His Chronicon summorum pontificum imperatorumque was a widely used work of reference. A different version made ‘Pope Joan’ the successor to Victor III, who had died in 1087. In this case, she revealed her sex by giving birth while mounting a horse. She was promptly tied to the horse’s tail and stoned to death. That account appeared in the Universal Chronicle of Mainz prepared by another inventive Dominican, Jean de Mailly, also in the mid-thirteenth century.
It is not remarkable that medieval chroniclers should have told strange tales; but it is remarkable that their fabrications should have passed without question for centuries. Both Petrarch and Boccaccio believed them. A statue of Pope Joan stands alongside those of other popes in the cathedral at Siena. When Jan Hus cited her at the Council of Constance as an instance of ecclesiastical abuse, he was not corrected. An enigmatic monument near the Church of San Clemente in Rome, at the spot where the Pope’s child was supposedly delivered, is said to have stood undisturbed until the 1560s. No scholar seems to have doubted the fable until the Annales of the Bavarian, ‘Aventinus’, published in 1554. Its historicity was only demolished definitively in treatises written by the French Protestant, David Blondel, in 1647 and 1657.
Textbooks of medieval history treat Pope Joan, if at all, as a minor curiosity. In fact, she signals a mode of gender image that differed markedly from that of a later age. There must have been something inherently credible in the fable for it to have persisted so long. Joan herself may not have been historical. But the fable certainly was.1
Charlemagne, however, was an energetic builder. He built palaces at Nijmegen, Engelheim, and Aachen. He bridged the Rhine at Mainz, and linked the tributaries of the Rhine and Danube with a canal, the Kaisergrab. He was the pioneer of romanesque architecture north of the Alps. By reputation, Charlemagne was also a great patron of learning. He himself, though a forceful orator, was illiterate. But he employed scholars of repute—Alcuin of York, Peter of Pisa, Agobard of Lyons. He collected manuscripts, revised the text of the Bible, published grammars, histories, and ballads. His lifestory, the Vita Karoli by Abbot Einhard, has been called ‘the first secular biography’. Not everyone is impressed: one historian has blamed Charlemagne for ‘saddling us with a literary tradition of derivative book-learning which hangs today like a millstone round the neck of our educational system’.3 [AGOBARD] [PFALZ]
Charlemagne did not hesitate to govern the Church as an integral part of his domains. At the Council of Frankfurt of 794 he rejected the decrees of the (VIIth) General Council of Nicaea. Bishoprics and abbeys were regarded as feudal benefices and subject to the law of treason. Whilst forbidding his bishops to engage in battle, he spread the Gospel by fire and sword. Whether he grasped the Sermon on the Mount is a moot point. His services to Christianity were eventually rewarded by canonization, though the process was obstructed for 351 years by reports that his sexual conquests were no less extensive than his territorial ones.
Charlemagne died on 28 January 814. On his tomb in Aachen, since lost, a portrait was placed, and an inscription:
Beneath this tomb lies the body of Charles, great and orthodox Emperor, who nobly increased the kingdom of the Franks, and reigned prosperously for forty-seven years. He died in his seventies in the year of our Lord 814, in the seventh indiction, on the fifth of the Kalends of February.4
AGOBARD
BY all the omens, 810 was going to be Charlemagne’s worst year. There were two eclipses of the sun and two of the moon, all observable in Frankland. And sure enough, the Emperor’s pet elephant, a gift from the Caliph, died; there was a widespread outbreak of cattle-plague; and the Duke of Benevento rebelled.
All this, and more, was faithfully recorded by Agobard, Bishop of Lyons (c.779–840). What is more, Agobard found that the common people were drawing superstitious conclusions. They believed that their cattle were dying from a poisonous dust spread by the Duke of Benevento’s spies. They also believed that Frankland was being invaded by ‘cloud-borne ships’ navigated by ‘aerial sailors’. The invaders were said to be beating down the harvest of the Franks with hailstones launched from the sky, before carrying it off to the far-away land of ‘Magonia’. Agobard was not easily swayed by such stories which, after investigation, he duly refuted. Yet he did appear to believe that the Catholic Church was being invaded by Jews. When his collected works were discovered in 1605, it turned out that he had devoted no fewer than five treatises to the Jewish peril.1
Agobard’s most remarkable departure, however, was to demand the establishment of a universal Christian law for a universal Christian commonwealth. ‘If God has suffered so that all be reconciled in his Body,’ he wrote, ‘is not the incredible diversity of laws … in opposition to this divine work of unity?’ Agobard was the first European centralist.
PFALZ
AACHEN takes its name from the Roman spa of Aquisgranium, ‘Waters of Apollo-Granus’. Its warm, healing waters explain Charlemagne’s choice for the site of his favourite residence, the Kaiserpfalz. The French name, Aix-la-Chapelle, marks the famous chapel, now part of Aachen Cathedral, which Charlemagne added to his palace.
Charlemagne’s chapel was completed in 805. It is a three-tiered octagon, built in the Byzantine style of San Vitale in Ravenna, which Charlemagne had seen and admired. Its proportions are said to follow the mystical numbers of the seventh vision of St John’s Revelation. In its day it was the largest stone building north of the Alps. Round the interior of the octagon, above the first tier of Roman arches, there runs a dedication reputedly composed by Alcuin:
CUM LAPIDES VIVI PACIS CONPAGE LIGANTUR
Since the living stones have been joined in peaceful harmony,
INOUE PARES NUMEROS OMNIA CONVENIUNT
And all numbers and measurements are in agreement
CLARET OPUS DOMINI, TOTAM OUI CONSTRUIT AULAM
The work of the Lord who built this hall will shine brightly.
EFFECTUSOUE PUS DAT STUDIIS HOMINUM
The completed edifice crowns the pious efforts of the people
QUORUM PERPETUI DECORIS STRUCTURA MANEBIT
Whose work will remain forever as a monument of beauty
SI PERFECTA AUCTOR PROTEGAT ATQUE REGAT.
If the Author of All things protects and rules over it.
SIC DEUS HOC TUTUM STABILI FUNDAMINE TEMPLUM
May God therefore watch over this temple
OUOD KAROLUS PRINCEPS CONDIDIT, ESSE VELIT.
Which Charles the Prince has founded on a solid base.
The decoration of the chapel is heavy with the imperial symbolism which Charlemagne and his successors had revived in a new and naïve Christian setting. A mosaic inside the dome represents the Adoration of the Lamb. The ambo or pulpit is encrusted with fragments of Roman pottery, glass, and an eagle cameo. Egyptian columns in green and rose porphyry support the second tier of arches. The pala d’oro or altar panel portrays the Passion in classic Roman relief and in solid gold. The Lotharkreuz or Cross of Lothar is a magnificent Christian ornament of beaten gold encrusted with antique gems. It is surmounted by a central portrait cameo of the Emperor Augustus. The imperial throne, cut from simple slabs of white marble, looks down from the first-floor gallery as it did during all the 32 coronations of 700 years. The message is clear: the Empire which Charlemagne launched thought of itself both as Holy and as Roman.
In the twelfth century, on the orders of Frederick Barbarossa, the chapel was turned into Charlemagne’s shrine. In 1165 the body of the newly canonized saint was transferred to a casket of solid gold. It was surrounded by a collection of suitable relics—the loincloth of Christ, the Virgin’s girdle, a splinter of Charlemagne’s skull—all placed in precious reliquaries. Barbarossa himself donated a huge, wheel-shaped, iron chandelier, the ‘Crown of Lights’, which is suspended in the centre of the octagon and which symbolizes the walls of the New Jerusalem. It bears another long inscription:
Jerusalem, celestial Zion; John, herald of salvation saw Thee … Frederick, Catholic Emperor of the Roman Empire pledged this crown of lights as a princely gift … Now, O Holy Virgin, he dedicates it to Thee. O Stella Maris, O Star of the Sea, take the humble Frederick into Thy care … and protect the Emperor’s wife, Beatrix.
Today the imperial chapel at Aachen is ranked among the foremost wonders of romanesque art. But it is more than that. It provides a history lesson more vivid than any book can offer. As visitors enter, they pass through the Wolf’s Door—so called after the legend of the wolf who cheated the Devil for possession of the chapel. It is a dull mind that is not gripped by the powerful fusion of the barbarian and the classical, of the Christian and the pagan, which provided the spiritual drive of the age. Here is Western Europe’s greatest memorial to a time when romanesque was a novelty, and when the centre of civilization still lay in the East.1
Charlemagne’s lifeblood had been the cement of the realm. His inheritance was immediately disputed by his son and grandsons. Repeated partitions ensured its early disintegration. In 817 the partition of Aachen provoked civil war; in 843, following protracted family slaughter, the Treaty of Verdun produced a three-way split between the surviving grandsons. Charles the Bald received the Western, Romance sector—Neustria, Aquitaine, western Burgundy, and the Spanish March. Lothair I, King of Italy, received the title of Emperor together with the ‘Middle Kingdom’, consisting of Austrasia, eastern Burgundy, Provence, and Italy. Lewis the German received the bulk of the eastern, solidly Germanic sector (see Map 12). The Treaty of Verdun created the core of both the future Germany and the future France. The ‘Middle Kingdom’ was left a bone of eternal contention between them. Charlemagne’s ultimate legacy was not just the example of fragile unity but, equally, the prospect of unending strife, [KRAL]
The feuding of the Carolingians or ‘Karlings’ created an opportunity which the Vikings were quick to exploit. The summer of 841 saw them sailing up the Seine to plunder Rouen. In 843–4, following the Treaty of Verdun, they wintered on the island of Noirmoutier. In 854 the new city of Hamburg was burned, and Paris was sacked while Charles the Bald took refuge on Montmartre. In 847 the ancient city of Bordeaux was taken hostage for years. In 852 an ominous precedent was set when Charles the Bald, having trapped the Viking host in their camp at Jeufosse near the Seine estuary, paid them off with gold and permanent grants of land. He was rewarded by repeated raids which Orléans alone was able to resist.
KRAL
CHARLEMAGNE ravaged the Slavs on at least four fronts. He reduced the Abotrites and Sorbs, to the east of the Elbe, in 789. He forced the Czechs of Bohemia to pay tribute in 805–6, and the Carinthian Slavs of the Sava and Drava likewise. In respect for the great conqueror, the Slavs adopted his name as their word for ‘king’. Karol has become kral in Czech, król in Polish, korol’ in Russian. The Franks gave the Slavs their first model of Christian kingship. (Kral even means ‘king’ in Turkish.)
In the West, Charlemagne was adopted as the presiding monarch of numerous medieval legends, the supreme hero of the chansons de geste.’ Already in the ninth century, a monk of St Gall composed a largely fabulous chronicle, De Gestis Karoli Magni. Soon Charlemagne was to be portrayed by the troubadours as the ubiquitous champion of Christendom, swinging his sacred sword ‘Joyeuse’, smiting the infidel, riding at the head of his companions—Roland, Ganelon, Naimes of Bavaria, Ogier the Dane, Guillaume of Toulouse, Turpin the battling Archbishop of Reims.
In the French tradition the ‘twelve peers’ of Charlemagne consisted of the three Dukes of Normandy, Burgundy, and Aquitaine, the three Counts of Champagne, Toulouse, and Flanders, and the six spiritual peers, the Bishops of Reims, Laon, Châlons, Beauvais, Langres, and Noyon.
In the German legends Charlemagne was often said to be sleeping, waiting for the call to wake and save his beloved subjects from their ills. In the Bavarian tale he is seated on a chair in the Untersberg, as on his throne in the chapel at Aachen. The end of the world will be nigh when his beard has grown thrice round the table before him. In the German language, Charlemagne’s name has been given to the constellation of the Great Bear—the Karlswagen. In Old English, the ‘Charles Wain’ was an alternative name for the constellation of the Plough.
Later, both in France and Germany, Charles the Great was hailed as the progenitor of the nation’s royalty. For the French ‘Charlemagne’, for the Germans ‘Karl der Grosse’, he was seen not as a Frank but as a patriotic French or German leader. His example was invoked at Napoleon’s imperial coronation in 1804. His portrait occupies the first place in the gallery of the German emperors painted in 1838–52 in the Kaisersaal at Frankfurt.2
In the twentieth century, Charles the Great has been more regarded as a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation. In 1943, when the Nazis formed a new division of French volunteers for the Waffen SS, or in 1955 when the Council of Europe funded a Prize ‘for services to the cause of European unity’, the organizers appealed to the same name—to ‘Charlemagne’.
In 864, by the Edict of Pîtres, Charles the Bald at last gave orders for all localities to build fortifications, and for a task force of cavalry to be on hand. But relief was still far off. Year after year the internecine wars of the Carolingians were studded with royal deaths, with temporary partitions, and with Viking raids of ever greater insolence. From 867 to 878 the Danes were preoccupied in England. In 880 they ravaged the valley of the Elbe. In 885–6,40,000 Vikings poured out of 700 longships drawn up on the present-day Champ de Mars, and laid siege to Paris for eleven months. Count Odo conducted a heroic defence, only to find that the Emperor, Charles the Fat, had paid off the Vikings with 700 lb of silver and packed them off into Burgundy.
In the British Isles, which had escaped the attentions of Charlemagne, the impact of the Vikings was particularly severe. The Danish invasions created divisions which persisted for 200 years. Egbert, King of Wessex, had been recognized as Bretwalda or overlord of Britain in 828. Within a generation, however, the Danes were challenging the supremacy of Wessex. Alfred the Great, King of Wessex (r. 849–99), spent a lifetime containing them. At one point, in 878, he was forced to hide in the marshes of Athelney in Somerset. But battles in that same year enabled him to partition the country. The Treaty of Wedmore created the Danelaw—a vast area subject to Danish rule. From then on, until the fateful year of 1066, England was to be disputed by the English house of Wessex and the Danes. In the tenth century, after the expulsion of Eric Bloodaxe, the last Danish king of York, Viking raids were resumed with a vengeance. In 994 London was beset by a combined force of Danes and Norwegians. From 1017–35 Knut, or Canute, ruled over a vast North Sea empire linking England with Scandinavia. The old Anglo-Saxon kingdom enjoyed a brief respite under Edward the Confessor (r. 1042–66), founder of Westminster Abbey. Edward’s death in 1066 prompted a war between three rival claimants—Harold Hardrada of Norway, Harold Godwinson of Wessex, and William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy.
Whilst the English battled the Danes, the rest of the British Isles witnessed a long, complex struggle between Vikings and Celts. Fluctuating federations of Northmen fought fluctuating leagues of Celtic princes. In Ireland, the Celts held the interior against fortified Viking settlements on the coast. After a century of mayhem, they finally gained the upper hand under the much-sung Bhriain Boroimhe (Brian Bora, r. 1002–14), who left the kingdom to be disputed between the O’Brians, the O’Neills, and the O’Connors. There followed an era when the Irish again ruled the whole of Ireland unchallenged for 150 years. An Ard Rih or ‘High King’ of Erin held authority over the lesser kings of the ‘Fifths’ of Meath, Munster, Leinster, Ulster, and Connaught; the ancient Brehon Laws, which had originated in prehistoric times, were written down to provide a firm framework of administrative practice and social custom; and the traditional life of the fine or ‘clans’ held sway under its assemblies, its judges, and the growing influence of an increasingly institutionalized Church. In Wales, the Celtic principalities were trapped between Vikings on the coasts and unrelenting English pressure on the inland borders. From the eighth century onwards they were held behind the great Dyke built by Offa, King of Mercia, and were largely cut off from their kinsmen in Strathclyde and Cornwall. They found champions and temporary overlords in the much-sung Rhodri Mawr (Roderick the Great, d. 877) and Grufrydd ap Llywelyn (Griffith, d. 1063). [LLANFAIR]
In the north of Britain the Gaelic King of Kintyre, Kenneth MacAlpin (d. c.860) was the first to join Picts with Scots, and thereby to launch the concept of a united ‘Scotland’. After that, a three-sided contest emerged between the Gaels of the highlands, the English of the lowlands, and the Norsemen of the outer isles. It was in 1040 that Macbeth, Lord of Moray, who is said to have made a pilgrimage to Rome, determined to murder Duncan, King of the Scots:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.5
The history of Britain’s Celts was recorded by their bards, and by chroniclers such as Marianus Scotus (c.1028–83). It was of little interest to the English, like William Shakespeare, until a much later date.
In the midst of the chaos, five Frankish kingdoms were steadily drifting apart, as each was left to fend for itself. In Neustria, royal authority declined to the point where hereditary fiefs began to emerge in each of the main counties—in Toulouse (862), in Flanders (862), in Poitou (867), in Anjou (870), in Gascony, Burgundy, and Auvergne. These were the kernels of the later French provinces. In 911 Charles the Simple, King of France, lifted the Viking threat by signing the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte with the veteran sea-king Hrolfe or Rollo. The origins of ‘Normandy’ seem to have lain in a French version of the Danelagh in England. In the eastern kingdom, Arnulf of Carinthia cleared Germany of Norsemen, but only by importing the Magyars. A kingdom of upper Burgundy had crystallized round the court of Count Rudolf at St Maurice/Moritz, and a kingdom of lower Burgundy under Count Boso at Arles. In Italy, where Moorish ‘saracens’ from Sicily played Vikings, successive invasions by the Byzantines in 874–95, the Neustrians in 877, and the Austrasians in 894–6 left all political authority in shreds. By 900 Count Berengar of Friuli was left in sole possession through a process of sanguinary elimination. Western historians have often described those final decades of the ninth century as the ‘darkest hour’ of the Dark Ages.
LLANFAIR
APART from being wonderfully expressive, the place names of medieval Wales provide a point of entry into the study of historical developments, such as land settlement, which took place before the era of documentary records. They are informative as well as curious.
In the centuries prior to the English conquest (see p. 408), the land in Wales was subject to the competing jurisdictions of the native princes, of the Anglo-Norman marcher lords, and of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The princes, who were entirely Welsh by culture, ruled over the five principalities of Gwynedd, Powys, Deheubarth, Morganwg, and Gwent. The marcher lords, with a mixture of English and French connections, dominated the east and the south. The bishops, who were educated in Church Latin, were based on the four dioceses of Bangor, St Asaph, St David’s, and Llandaff. By analysing the interplay of Welsh and non-Welsh names with the intersection of secular and ecclesiastical authority, historians can build up a picture of how, when, by whom, and for what purposes settlements were founded or extended.1
Some places in Wales, for example, have names which only exist in the Welsh form and which are clearly ecclesiastical in origin. The commonest of them all is Llanfair, meaning ‘St Mary’s’. Others in this category would be Betws-y-Coed (Chapel in the Wood) or Eglwys Fair (St Mary’s Church). More common are place-names which are obviously ecclesiastical in origin but which have bilingual forms. Such are Llanbedr/Lampeter (St Peter’s), Caergybi/Holyhead in Anglesey, or Llanbedr Fynydd/Peterston-super-Montem in Glamorgan. Then there are the places with bilingual names of secular origin. Such are Abertewe/Swansea, Cas Gwent/ Chepstow, and Y Gelli Gandryll/Hay-on-Wye in Brecknockshire. Modern ‘Hay’ derives from the medieval Norman La Haie Taillée (Clipped Hedge).
The final category comprises bilingual forms with mixed ecclesiastical and secular associations. This would include Llanfihangel Troddi/ Mitchell Troy in Monmouthshire and Llansanffraid-ar-Ogwr/St Bride’s Minor in Glamorgan.
The most famous of Welsh place names, however, has no medieval origins. When the London-Holyhead railway was opened in 1850, the first station on the Anglesey side of the Menai straits was at the village of Llanfair. Seeking fame and tourists, the station-master decided to improve its name, concocting an ‘ancient’ Welsh circumlocution which made the station’s nameboard longer than the station’s platform. What the British Post Office calls Llanfair P. G. ‘Jones the Station’ called Llanfairpwllgwyngyll-gogerychwerndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Tourists are told that it stands for ‘St Mary’s in a hollow of white hazel near to a rapid whirlpool and to St Tysilio’s Church by the red cave’.2
In those Western lands, disorder begat feudalism. One cannot easily distinguish causes from effects; but the fragmentation of political authority and the defence-lessness of the localities encouraged a series of political, legal, social, economic, and military developments which together form what later theoreticians have called ‘the feudal regime’. In reality, feudalism was not a uniform system: problems of definition and variation abound. One of the most influential modern summaries of the subject had to be called Qu’est-ce que laféodalité?:
Feudalism, in the technical sense, may be regarded as a body of institutions creating and regulating the obligations of obedience and service … on the part of one free man (the vassal) towards another free man (the lord), and the obligations of protection and maintenance on the part of the lord with regard to his vassal.6
The key elements were heavy cavalry, vassalage, enfeoffment, immunity, private castles, and chivalry.
Heavy cavalry, of a sort which demanded over-sized cataphracts or ‘great horses’ to carry armoured knights, came to the West from Persia and Byzantium. Charles Martel has been credited not only with their introduction but also with secularizing large amounts of Church land to support their upkeep. For this reason he has been called ‘the founder of European feudalism’.7 The stirrup was invented about the same time. By helping the horseman to stand firmly on his mount, and to carry a lance backed by the full momentum of horse and rider, the stirrup changed cavalry warfare from light, mobile skirmishing into heavyweight offence.8 The main problem, therefore, was to provide a social framework wherein a sizeable class of knights could permanently support both the psychological demands of their service and training and the enormous costs of their horses, their equipment, and their retinue. The upkeep of the knightly class—cabalarii, chevaliers, Rittern, szlachta—where landowning and the cavalry tradition went hand in hand, provided the central rationale of feudal society.
Vassalage grew out of the late Roman practice of commendatio, ‘commendation’, where a patron would seal an offer of protection by clasping the hands of his clients. In Carolingian times the lord began to be tied to his vassals or ‘subordinates’ by an oath of fealty, and by the act of homage sealed with a kiss. The two men embraced; the vassal knelt, and was invested with the symbols of his new status—a banner, a lance, a charter of agreement, a clod of earth. Thereafter they were bound for life in a mutual contract of reciprocal duties and obligations. The vassal was sworn to serve, the lord to protect and to maintain:
Berars de Monsdidier devant Karle est venuz;
A ses piez s’agenouille, s’est ses horn devenuz;
L’ampereres le baise, si l’a releve suz;
Par une blanche anisagne, li est ses fiez renduz.
(Berard of Montdidier came before Charlemagne, knelt at his feet, and became his man. The Emperor kissed him, when he had raised him up; and gave him his word by means of a white banner.)
The feodum or ‘fief’, whence feudalism takes its name, grew out of the earlier practice of beneficium or ‘benefit’, where a patron would make a gift of land in vague expectation of some future advantage. In Carolingian times, such land grants began to be made explicitly as the ‘fee’ for military service. In due course the feudal tariff was refined and extended. It was originally calculated in terms of knight-service, that is, the number of knights to be provided in return for a given area of land. But it was stretched to include castle-guard and escort duties, judicial service in the lord’s court,consilium or ‘advice’ rendered in the lord’s council, and various forms of auxilium or ‘assistance’. The lords came to interpret assistance in the sense of financial ‘reliefs’, including a downpayment equivalent to one year’s income plus the ‘aids in four kinds’ which were payable for the lord’s ransom, for the knighting of his eldest son, for the dowry of his eldest daughter, and for crusade. They also reserved their rights of custodia (wardship of minors), of gîte (lodging), of marriage (permission to marry), and of retrait (buying out the contract). But in exchange for the dues the vassal or ‘tenant’ received both the income of the land and the jurisdiction over all its inhabitants. In the case of default, the land and its income reverted to the owner.
In principle the fief was indivisible and inalienable. The contract automatically lapsed on the death of either party—in German Manfall or Herrenfall. In practice vassals went to great lengths to secure the succession of their relations and the right to divide or dispose of the land. For their part, lords took elaborate precautions to control the succession of women, of minors, or of incompetents. Special terms and eccentric clauses abounded. The chief vassals of the bishop of Paris were contracted to carry the bishop on their shoulders during his consecration. Certain fiefs in Kent were held on condition that their tenant ‘held the king’s head in the boat’ during Channel crossings. The opportunities for financial extortion were enormous. When Ferrand of Portugal contracted with the King of France for the fief of Flanders in 1212, he paid a ‘relief’ of £50,000 for permission to marry the heiress.
Not surprisingly, legal wrangles were endemic. It was usual practice at an early date for all sovereign territories to create a separate code of feudal law, the Lehnrecht, and a separate system of courts, the Lehnsgericht, for trying feudal disputes. The prince customarily acted as court president, his chief vassals as assessors. Feudalism is generally judged to have come into operation when the practice of enfeoffment, or infeudation, became hereditary, and when it was merged with vassalage into one coherent whole. ‘It was the indissoluble union between the position of a vassal and the possession of a fief that constituted the feudal system.’ In the last resort, however, vassalage and enfeoffment were incompatible. As vassals, the members of a knightly family were sworn to pursue the interests of their lord. As possessors of a fief, they were driven to pursue their own interests. Hence the characteristic tensions, and treacheries, of feudal society.
Feudal society consisted of a dense network of contractual relationships which linked the highest to the lowest in the realm. At the highest level, enfeoffment involved a contract between the sovereign and his ‘tenants-in-chief’, that is, with the barons holding the principal provinces of the kingdom. But through ‘sub-infeudation’ the tenants-in-chief could enfeoff tenants of their own; and subtenants could then enfeoff further tenants; and so on, right down the line. Most men who were vassals in relation to their ‘superiors’ acted as lords in relation to their ‘inferiors’.
Feudal contracts were recorded for posterity in charters and indentures, though few from the early period survive:
In the name of the Trinity … Amen. I, Louis, by the Grace of God King of the French, hereby make known to all present and those to come that in our presence Count Henry of Champagne conceded the fief of Savigny to Bartholomew, Bishop of Beauvais, and to his successors. And for that fief, the said bishop has made promise and engagement for one knight, and justice and service to Count Henry … and has agreed that bishops to come will do likewise. Done at Mantes, in the year of the Incarnate Word 1167… and given by the hand of Hugh, the chancellor.11
At the local level, the fiefs of princes and barons were reflected in the arrangements of manorial estates. In this case, the lord of the manor granted a plot of land to each of his serf families in exchange for service in the form of unpaid labour on his demesne. Enserfment, being a bargain between free and unfree, lacked many of the reciprocities of enfeoftment. But in so far that it implied a contract trading land for service, and protection for loyalty, it was based on similar principles. It was not to be confused with common slavery. In some parts of Europe—in northern Italy, for instance—serfs swore an oath of loyalty to their master, like knights to their liege-lord.
Given this network of contractual relationships, feudal society became extremely hierarchical. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 had stated the principle that ‘every man should have a lord’. In theory at least, the only persons to possess absolute independence were the Pope and the Emperor, and they were vassals of God. Attempts to describe this state of affairs have led to concepts such as the ‘feudal ladder’ or the ‘feudal pyramid’, where the ruler of a country sits gaily atop neat layers of tenants and subtenants and subsubtenants … right down to the serfs at the bottom. Such models mislead by their artificial neatness and symmetry. In reality, feudal society was built on a confused mass of conflicting dependencies and loyalties, riddled with exceptions and exemptions, where the once clear lines of service were fouled up by generations of contested privileges, disputed rights, and half-forgotten obligations. It was certainly hierarchical, but it was anything but neat and regular.
The extent of the survival of allodium, ‘freehold land’, was also very uneven. In some regions, such as the future Switzerland, freehold was common; in others, such as northern France, it virtually disappeared. Most usually there was a terrible tangle of feudal and freehold estates, and of families holding part of their land in fief and part in full ownership. To the feudal mind freehold was an aberration. It was sometimes called feodum solis, a ‘fief of the sun.’ Psychologically, however, the consequences were simple. Almost everyone was conditioned by their position in the social order, hemmed in by their legal and emotional ties of dependence. Those ties gave them a measure of security, and an unquestioned framework of identity, but they also made individuals vulnerable to exploitation, repression, and involuntary ignorance. ‘What characterizes mediaeval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom.’
One might also presume that a feeling of powerlessness over their personal lives added to medieval people’s preoccupation with religion—in particular to their strong belief in the afterlife, and to their morbid cult of death.
Immunitas or immunity concerned the granting of exemptions from taxes, or from other impositions due to the central authority. In the early days the Church was the chief beneficiary, but immunities of various sorts were gradually granted to a wide variety of individuals, institutions, and corporations. They stemmed from a recognition that rulers could no longer cope with all their responsibilities; and they fostered the fragmentation of political, jurisdictional, and economic authority. The result was a patchwork of authorities where each locality was governed not by any uniform obligations but by the specific terms of the charters and ‘liberties’ granted to the particular abbeys, districts, or cities. Particularism was a hallmark of the feudal order.
Stone castles, together with heavy cavalry, were one of the factors which eventually contained the damage inflicted by Viking, Saracen, and Magyar raiders. An impregnable fortress, perched on crag or coast, provided the inhabitants of the district with a place of refuge, and dominated the land over which its garrison could sally forth. Castle-building began in the ninth and tenth centuries, when royal and princely authority had reached its lowest ebb; and castles, once built, could be used to defy the king or prince long after the raiders had departed. In this way private castles became the bastions of local and feudal power, permanent obstacles to the resurgence of a centralized state. Many centuries later, when statesmen such as Cardinal Richelieu set out to break the feudal nobility, their first task lay in the razing of castles, [MIR]
Chivalry, which derives from chevalerie, ‘knightly class’, refers in its narrowest sense to the ‘code of honour’ by which every knight was bound. It encompasses moral values such as honesty, loyalty, modesty, gallantry, fortitude. It commanded the knight to protect the Church, to succour the weak, to respect women, to love his country, to obey his lord, to fight the infidel, to uphold truth and justice, and to keep his word. By extension, chivalry referred to all the customs and practices associated with knighthood—and hence to their titles, orders, ceremonies, heraldry, vocabulary. In its widest sense, however, it refers to the prevailing ethos of feudal society as a whole, which was so completely dominated by the knights and all they stood for. With Christianity, it is one of the twin pillars of ‘the medieval mind’.
Although many elements of nascent feudalism were present in Carolingian times, their full fusion into a coherent social order did not really begin until later. The ‘classic age of feudalism’ is generally located in the tenth to thirteenth centuries. The leading scholar of the subject distinguishes two feudal ages—the first from the ninth to the mid-eleventh centuries, where small-scale, caste-based arrangements prevailed between warlords and peasants, and a ‘second feudal age’, from the mid-eleventh to the mid-thirteenth century, which saw the flowering of feudal culture and the growth of hereditary nobility.13 Chivalry, in particular, was slow to emerge: its attitudes were not fully manifest until the era of the twelfth-century renaissance (see pp. 348–50).
Feudalism, rooted in the Carolingian débâcle, remained essentially a Western phenomenon. The Byzantine Empire made provision for hereditary land grants to soldiers; and the system of pomest’ye in early eastern Slavdom seems to have involved similar practices. But the state feudalism of the East, if that is what it was, lacked many of the basic ingredients. As far as the countries of central Europe are concerned, historians strongly disagree over the importance of feudal institutions. Marxists assume that feudalism had to be the basis for the social order; others, on the whole, argue that it did not.14 Everything depends on what definition of feudalism is used.
Feudalism deeply affected the life of the Church. It greatly weakened central ecclesiastical authority. It gave great power to local potentates, and put the clergy at their mercy. Counts and princes became accustomed to making and unmaking bishops at will. Lesser feudatories controlled the lesser clerics. ‘Bishops were in danger of becoming barons in mitres; kings looked on prelates as officials bound to do them service; and patrons sold [church] benefices to the highest bidder.’ Not even the Papacy was exempt. With limited means of their own, the Popes stood to become puppets either of Roman noblemen, of Italian princes, or, at a later stage, of a reviving Empire.
Thanks to the Benedictine monastery at Cluny in Burgundy, Western monasticism adapted itself to the changing circumstances. Isolated abbeys and hermitages had been specially vulnerable to both raiders and to local barons. They felt a strong need for a collective effort to strengthen their position. Founded in 910 by Guillaume le Pieux, Count of Auvergne, Cluny was the source of reforms which answered that need. The Cluniacs modified the Benedictine rule to include stricter observances and services of inhuman length. More importantly, they raised their abbot to a position of strict authority over all the daughter houses which they founded or co-opted. In effect, they established the first monastic order. Their iron discipline and their independence from local concerns gave them a strong voice in Church politics. Above all, having secured the popes’ support for their reforms, they became the unwavering advocates of papal supremacy. Between 910 and 1157 seven long-lived Abbots of Cluny—Berno, Odo, Aymard, Majolus, Odilo, St Hugh, and Peter the Venerable—created a network of 314 monasteries from Spain to Poland. It was no accident that the principal architect of the ‘papal monarchy’, Urban II, was himself a Cluniac (see below).
Feudalism left a profound legacy in Western culture. It moulded speech and manners; it conditioned attitudes to property, to the rule of law, and to relations between the state and the individual. By its emphasis on contract, and on the balance between rights and obligations, it generated lasting concern for mutual trust and for keeping one’s word. These attitudes held implications far beyond the narrow spheres of military service and land-holding.
The military dispositions of the feudal order were put to the test when the fearsome Magyars rode onto the stage at the end of the ninth century (see p. 296). Though not related to the Huns, the Magyars lived by the same predatory habits, and settled on the same plains of ‘Hungaria’. For sixty years, from 895 to 955, their annual raiding-parties stormed through the former Carolingian empire. They were every bit as murderous as the Vikings, and far fleeter. They were masters of blackmail, exacting vast sums in tribute or in ransom. In 899 they shattered the host of Italy on the River Brenta. In 904 they overwhelmed Moravia, in 907 Bavaria, in 922 Saxony. By the 940s they felt free to roam at will—to Apulia, to Aragon, to Aquitaine. They finally met their match when the princes and nobles of Germany united to challenge the latest invasion of Bavaria in 955. There, on the Lechfeld near Augsburg on 10–12 August, Otto of Saxony led the Germans to a famous victory in three days of slaughter. The Magyars were tamed. The remnants straggled back, and turned to the arts of tending their herds and ploughing the plain, [BUDA]
For some reason it has been the fashion among some historians to minimize the impact of the Magyars, who ‘were not a creative factor in the West’.16 (All this means is that the Magyars did not reach Cambridge.) They were, indeed, a destructive force. But they furnished the stimulus for developments of profound importance. By destroying Greater Moravia (see p. 321), they recast the ethnic and political patterns of the Danube basin, and determined the future profile of all Central Europe. Their presence was a vital element in the formation not only of Hungary but of Bohemia, of Poland, of Croatia and Serbia, of Austria, and of the German Empire. They created the living barrier which separated the Slavs of the north from the Slavs of the south. They opened the way for German colonists to move down the Danube, and to consolidate their hold on ‘Austria’. They drove the princes of Germany to unite, and to accept the victor of the Lechfeld as their emperor. One account relates how the German troops raised Otto of Saxony on their shields at the end of the battle, and acclaimed him emperor on the spot. This may not have been the Magyars’ intention. But for seven tribes of refugee nomads to have crossed the Carpathians, and within one lifetime to have provoked the rise of six or seven durable fixtures on the map of Europe, was no mean achievement. Only armchair historians, sitting in a backwater of an offshore island, might judge such developments trivial.
Of course, the elevation of Otto I of Saxony (r. 936–73), who was formally crowned Emperor in Rome in 962, cannot be attributed exclusively to his victory on the Lechfeld. His father, Henry the Fowler (r. 919–36), had already turned Saxony into a formidable power. From his palace at Mamleben in the Harz mountains he had initiated the eastern Marches, building walled towns and planting German settlers against the incursions of Danes, Slavs, and Magyars. Quedlinburg, Meissen, and Merseburg all date from that reign. So Otto was building on firm foundations. The Marches were consolidated with ecclesiastical help. The archbishopric of Magdeburg (968), the bishoprics of Brandenburg and Havelberg, and the new port of Hamburg could now be safely planted. Three campaigns in Italy, in 951–2, 961–5, and 966–72, ensured that the imperial link between Germany and Italy was restored. A series of civil wars, and of judicious matrimonial alliances, saw the wayward duchies of Franconia, Lotharingia, Swabia, and Bavaria reintegrated.
Henceforth the restored Empire was destined to have a continuous existence until its destruction by Napoleon. The leadership of the house of Saxony naturally turned its centre of gravity to the east, although its economic life was still dominated by the Rhineland. Its kingmaking capital stayed in Aachen; and its possession of Lotharingia, the old ‘Middle Kingdom’, gave it a permanent stake in western affairs. The Salian dynasty which followed the Saxons from 1024 to 1125 were of Frankish origin. But they no longer ruled the empire of the Franks. They ruled a creature which would grow into the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—the launch-pad of ‘Germany’ (see Appendix III, p. 1246).
In 972, at the end of his last campaign in Italy, Otto I took a momentous step. Having conquered the Byzantines’ Italian territories, he offered to return them in exchange for the mutual recognition of titles. He was to defer to the ‘Empire of the Romans’ if they would recognize his own, equal, imperial status. The agreement was sealed by the marriage of Otto’s son to Theophano, daughter of the previous Byzantine Emperor, Romanus II. From then on, there were to be two empires. The dream of one universal empire was lost forever. True enough, Theophano’s son, Otto III (r. 983–1002), did entertain visions of a wider realm. He made a pilgrimage to Aachen to open Charlemagne’s tomb, and he paid an official visit to his eastern Polish neighbours. But his ideas attracted support neither in Germany nor in Constantinople, and he left no heirs. His successor, Henry II (r. 1002–24), the last of the Saxon line, was soon grappling with all the problems which became the Empire’s normal burden: civil wars in Germany, frontier wars against the Slavs, expeditions into Italy, sporadic conflict with France.
Otto I had viewed the Papacy with autocratic disdain. He ordered that no pope should be consecrated before swearing allegiance to the Empire. Having hanged the tribunes and Prefect of Rome, he imposed John XIII (965–72) as a prelude to his own coronation. For the time being, the Latin Pope was scarcely more independent than the Greek Patriarch. Generally speaking, the Saxon emperors left the feuding rulers of ‘West Francia’ to their own devices. In the tenth century, the heirs of the Carolingians were locked in a complicated struggle of rivalry and mutual dependence with the descendants of Robert, Count of Paris, notably with Hugues le Grand, ‘Duke of the French’, a habitual kingmaker. In the process they lost their stake in Lotharingia, and hence of the old Frankish heartland. In 987, when the last Carolingian king died without heir, the struggle was resolved in favour of the Duke’s son, Hugues Capet (r. 987–96)—founder of a dynasty that would reign for nearly 400 years.
Henceforth the kingdom of France was destined to have a continuous existence. The leadership of the house of Capet inevitably turned the centre of gravity to the West. Of course, the memory of Charlemagne, and the claims to Lotharingia remained; but the kingdom had lost its essentially Frankish character. Contrary to later assertions, it was not involved in ceaseless warfare with its German neighbours; but its definitive separation from the reconstituted Empire acted as a powerful motor for a new identity. It was the launch-pad of the French nation.
In the period when the Frankish empire waned and the Saxon empire waxed strong, the Byzantine Empire reached its zenith under the Macedonian dynasty. Basil I (r. 867–86), an ex-horsebreaker who took the throne through murder, proved to be an able administrator who initiated ‘an age of recovery and consolidation’. The long reigns of his successors, Leo VI the Wise (r. 886–912) and Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (r. 913–59), both of them scholars, coincided with a marked upsurge in Constantinople’s commercial prosperity. The warrior emperors, John Tzimisces (r. 969–76) and Basil II Bulgaroctone (r. 976–1025), ‘the Bulgar-slayer’, took the offensive on all fronts. The Empress Zoë (c.978–1050) maintained power for half a century through the manipulation of three imperial husbands. Her portrait in mosaic has survived in Hagia Sophia, flanked on one side by Christ and on the other by an emperor whose inscription has been suitably obliterated. Her scheming sister Theodora (r. 1055–6) briefly emerged as sole ruler, [ATHOS]
Under the Macedonians, the Byzantine state was able to assert itself both internally and externally. The Patriarchs were kept in abject subservience. The imperial court presided over a bureaucracy which introduced uniform practices throughout the provinces. The army was reorganized with professional, knightlike cadres. The aristocratic clans were wedded to state service. The state regulated trade and prices whilst maximizing its own income. With a population counted in six figures, Constantinople served as the leading entrepôt between East and West, by far exceeding all other European cities of the age. Byzantium’s territorial power was greatly reinforced. Basil I re-established the Byzantine presence in southern Italy with the recapture of Taranto (880). There were two exarchates, in Calabria and in Langobardia, and a Catapenatus at Bari. In the East, annual campaigns throughout the tenth century were rewarded with the recovery of Syria, Cyprus, Crete, Cilicia, part of Mesopotamia. The Arab advance was checked. Armenia, which in the ninth century had been ruled by the native Bagratid dynasty, was returned to Byzantine vassalage. The Bulgars, who in 924 laid siege to Constantinople, spread their hegemony to the west, but were gradually tamed by baptism and the sword.
Political stability set the stage for a cultural renaissance. Basil I and Leo VI, a philosopher, codified the imperial decrees of recent centuries. Byzantine church architecture acquired harmonious homogeneity. Men of letters crowded the court. Photios (c.810–93), Patriarch and professor, revived the study of antiquity. Simeon Metaphrastes (d. c.1000) composed the Menologion, the standard collection of the lives of the Christian saints. His contemporary, the poet John Geometres, wrote hymns, epigrams, and verse with great humanist sensitivity. Michael Psellos (c.1018–81), court philosopher and polymath, published a huge range of historical, theological, and literary works. Critics of the ‘Macedonian Renaissance’ maintain that its achievement was more encyclopedic than creative.
ATHOS
IN a chrysobull of 885, the Emperor Basil I formally recognized the ‘Holy I Mountain’ of Athos as a territory reserved for monks and hermits. Henceforth, all civilians and females (human and non-human) were banned from the 360 km2 of the ‘Garden of the Virgin’ on the easternmost of the three sea-girt promontories of Chalkidikës. The first permanent monastery, the Great Laura, was founded in 936. The basic typikon or charter dates from 972. The peninsula of Mount Athos, which rises to 2,033 m., was to be ruled by a protos or primate and by a council of abbots meeting in the central town of Karyes.1
From the outset, Athonite monasticism had to compromise between the communal and the anchorite traditions. Thirteen of the twenty great monasteries built between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries were purely coenobitic, having all activities in common, whilst seven wereidiorhythmic, allowing monks to eat and work individually. These include the three oldest—the Great Laura, Vatopedi, and the Georgian-founded Iveron. Each of the monasteries is linked to a network of outlying farms, chapels, and anchorite cells. The ultimate sanctuary of the hermits is to be found in the vertigo-defying settlement of Karoulia, at the precipitous end of the peninsula, where the warren of individual huts is approached along a maze of cliff paths, stone steps, and chain ladders.
Over the centuries, Athos came under threat from a succession of invaders, including Arab pirates, Lakh shepherds, and Catalan raiders. In the period of the Latin Empire (1204–61), concerted attempts were made to convert the monks to Catholicism—hence their trenchant opposition to all later movements for East-West union. After that, they found ready patrons in the princes of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Wallachia. When Salonika was captured by the Turks in 1430, the monks secured their privileges from the sultan.
In the eighteenth century, Athos was the centre of an important pan-orthodox movement linked to the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Academy at Vatopedi was a seat of international learning.
In the nineteenth century, Athos was targeted by St Petersburg as an instrument of Russian influence. As many as 5,000 Russian monks took up residence, especially in the roussikon of St Panteleimon and in the skete of St Andrew. Greek, Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian foundations were similarly turned into agencies of their respective national churches. Athos lost its last great benefactor in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Its present constitution was introduced by treaty with Greece in 1926.
After decades of decay, a fresh influx of monks in the 1980s raised total numbers to c.1,500, fuelling demands for reform. Monasteries were repaired, commercial forestry exploited, access roads built, and (male) tourists welcomed. Discussions took place about renewed contacts with Rome. A monk of Athos published his complaints for an international audience.2 ‘The Athonites are famous factionists and gossips,’ an observer commented. ‘After all, it is the heart of what remains of the Byzantine world.’
Secure and confident beyond the disasters which beset the West, Byzantium cruised along in style. When Liutprand of Cremona, historian of Otto the Great and ambassador of the King of Italy, visited Constantinople in 949 he was overwhelmed with amazement. His reception by Constantine Porphyrogenitus impressed, and offended, him mightily:
‘In front of the emperor’s throne stood a tree of gilded iron, whose branches were filled with birds of various kinds, also made of gilded iron, which gave forth a variety of bird-songs. The throne itself was so cunningly constructed that at one moment it looked low … and a moment later had risen to a great height. It was guarded on either side by huge lions of gilded metal or wood which lashed their tails on the floor and roared aloud with open mouths and moving tongues.
In this hall, attended by two eunuchs, I was brought before the emperor. At my entrance, the lions roared and the birds sang … But after prostrating myself for the third time, when I raised my head, I beheld the emperor, whom I had seen at first seated slightly above me, elevated almost to the roof of the hall and clad in different garments. How this was managed, I do not know …’
Liutprand’s understandable sense of inferiority aptly reflects Western attitudes towards the East in this period.
Byzantium’s principal foe was Islam, against which it stood as Christendom’s front-line bastion. But on its Balkan flank it faced a vigorous state that was a major rival for more than two centuries. The first Bulgarian Empire emerged from the tribal adventures of Terbel, Krum, and Omartag (see p. 220) and exercised sway over much of Byzantium’s former Danubian provinces. Its adoption of Orthodox Christianity (see pp. 321–4) brought it into the world of Byzantine civilization, but did not prevent intense conflicts. Under Simeon (r. 893–927), who styled himself ‘Basileus kai Autokrator of the Bulgars and Greeks’ as well as ‘Tsar’ (Caesar), Bulgaria sought to assume Byzantium’s role in the Balkans, but came to grief in 924 before the walls of Constantinople. In the tenth century Byzantine forces reconquered the eastern heartland of Bulgaria. In this they were helped by the strife surrounding the Bogumil heresy, and by their Magyar and Kievan mercenary allies. In 966–7 Svyatoslav of Kiev attacked and captured the ancient Bulgarian capital, Preslav, in return for 1,800 pounds of Byzantine gold.
Under Tsar Samuel (r. 976–1014) the Bulgarian empire knew a second lease of life. The new capital of Ochrid became the centre of a powerful monastic movement, and of an autocephalous Bulgarian Church that survived the Byzantine reconquest. The political end came in 1014, following the Byzantine victory at Serres in Macedonia. Basil II blinded 14,000 Bulgarian prisoners of war before returning them to their Tsar, who promptly died of shame. Byzantium was still some way from the great crisis of 1071, when the Normans in Sicily, the Seljuks in Asia Minor, and the Pechenegs before the walls of Constantinople combined to provoke the onset of irreversible decline, [BOGUMIL]
In the three centuries after Charlemagne the frontiers of Christendom were greatly extended. The countries converted were (in the order of their conversion) Moravia, Bulgaria, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, and Kievan Rus’. In the north, the steady advance of the Saxon marches was accompanied by forcible christianization; but it was not until the eleventh century that any major advance was made into Scandinavia. Despite considerable friction on the ground, the leadership of the Greek and Latin Churches were still apt to view their missionary work as the common task of Christendom.
Moravia—whose name is related to the German Mähren, meaning march-lands—lay on the north bank of the Danube to the east of Charlemagne’s empire. It was the first of the Slav lands to emerge as an organized principality. In the seventh century, under one Samo, it is mentioned in Fredegar’s chronicle as a territory that had rejected the Frankish obedience. In the eighth century it was evangelized from Bavaria by (among others) the Irish missionary, Virgil of Salzburg. In the ninth century the reigning prince appears to have been baptized by a German bishop, and a church was consecrated at Nitra.
In 862, however, a Moravian approach to the Patriarch of Constantinople was answered by a mission led by two Macedonian brothers, Michael and Constantine, known respectively as SS Methodius (815–85) and Cyril (826–67). Methodius had been governor of one of the Byzantine empire’s Slav provinces; and Cyril, a diplomat, had travelled in the Muslim lands and in Khazaria. The purpose of their invitation to Moravia was apparently to check the oppressive influence of German priests, and to enable the country to worship in its own idiom. To this end Cyril devised the Glagolitic alphabet and a Slavonic liturgy, and translated the Bible.
After founding the Moravian mission, it is significant that the brothers travelled to Rome, where Cyril died. He was interred in the crypt of San Clemente. But Methodius returned to exercise his calling as Bishop of Pannonia and Moravia. He died in 885, probably at Velehrad near modern Bratislava. There was clearly much wrangling in Moravia between Latin and Greek clergy; yet Cyril and Methodius, the ‘Apostles of the Slavs’, enjoyed the patronage both of the Roman Pope and of the Byzantine Patriarch, thereby setting a rare, ecumenical example. Their names are revered by Czechs, Croats, and Serbs, and especially by the Bulgars, among whom the remnants of the mission eventually took refuge. Twenty years after the death of Methodius, Moravia was destroyed by the Magyars; but the memory of the ‘co-patrons of Europe’ has lingered on.
In Bulgaria, the rivalry of the Latin and the Greek Churches was ultimately resolved in favour of the Greeks. In the mid-ninth century the ruler of Bulgaria.
BOGUMIL
IN 975 the Emperor John Tzimisces transplanted a community of Armenian heretics to the district of Philipopolis (Plovdiv) in Bulgarian Thrace. They were ‘Paulicians’, remnants of a much larger movement broken by the Byzantines some time earlier. At the same time, the Orthodox Church was showing concern about the followers of an obscure Bulgarian priest, Bogumil, whose errors suspiciously resembled those of the Paulicians. They too were dualists, heirs to a tradition that went back to the Gnostics and the (non-Christian) Manicheans. Merging together, the two groups were to found a faith whose adherents would stretch right across Europe ‘from Black Sea to Biscay’.1
Bogumilstvo or ‘Bogumilism’ appealed to the downtrodden Slav peasants of the Balkans, resentful of Greek or Bulgar overlords. It was to develop in two forms, the main, ‘Bulgarian’ variety and the lesser, ‘Dragovitsan’ variety, so named after a village on the borders of Macedonia, where a thoroughgoing dualist doctrine of Paulician origin took root. It was brought to Constantinople by a monk called Basil the Bulgar, many of whose unrepentant followers were burned at the stake. But it resurfaced in the mid-twelfth century, when ‘false bishops’ had to be dismissed and a patriarch retired for Bogumil sympathies.
Bogumil doctrine diverged from Orthodox Christianity on issues derived from their views on the origin of evil. The Bogumils rejected the creation story of the Old Testament, believing that the world was created by Satan, God’s elder son. They also rejected Christ’s miracles, except as allegorical stories, the Sacraments, icons, feast days, and the entire liturgy and ritual of Orthodoxy. They specially detested the Cross since it was the instrument of Christ’s murder. According to one account, they believed that God had tempered his wrath by allowing Satan to keep what was already created, and that he sent Jesus, his second Son, to cure the resultant ills. Jesus, the embodiment of the Word, ‘entered the Virgin through her ear, took flesh there and emerged by the same door. The Virgin did not notice, but found Him as an infant in a Cave in Bethlehem. He lived and taught, and by seeming to die, was able to descend into Hell and bind Satan.’
Bogumil practices appeared very strange to contemporaries. Bogumils read only selected parts of the Bible, especially the Psalms, the Prophets, the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation. Their only prayer was ‘Our Father’, which they recited 120 times a day. They practised fasting, discouraged marriage, and trained an élite caste of ‘the Elect’. One branch, the followers of Cyril the Barefoot, practised nudism in an attempt to regain the Garden of Eden. Another, following the preacher Theodosius, indulged in orgies, deliberately experiencing sin in order to qualify forrepentance. In political matters, all Bogumils presented a front of passive but obdurate nonconformity.
Though Bogumilism was eradicated in Byzantium and Bulgaria during the thirteenth century, it had spread by then to the West (see pp. 361—3), and was taking root in fresh parts of the Balkans. In the fourteenth century it even penetrated the holy mountain of Athos. But its greatest success was to occur in the principalities of Bosnia and Hum (Hercegovina), whose rulers chose to propagate the Bogumil faith as an antidote to the pretensions of their Hungarian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox neighbours. It was in 1199 that the Ban of Bosnia and his court first declared themselves ‘Patarenes’, as the Bosnian Bogumils were called; and despite many twists of religious fortune, Bosnia remained predominantly Patarene until the Ottoman conquest of 1463. At this point the Bosnian nobility converted promptly to Islam, thereby avoiding the Catholic and Orthodox trap once again. [SARAJEVO]
Scholars once believed that the Slavs were predisposed to Bogumilism through the dualist beliefs of Slav paganism. Hetmold of Lübeck reported in the twelfth century that the north German Slavs worshipped a good God and a bad God. If so, the phenomenon was purely local. Pagan Slavs were more likely to have been affected by Bogumilism than vice versa. The same can be said of Balkan folklore.
Dualists of the Bogumil type attracted many labels. Among them, apart from Bogumils, Dragovitsans, and Patarenes, were the Phundaites or ‘scrip-bearers’, Babuni (in Serbia), Runcarii or Runkeler (in Germany), Kudugers (in fifteenth-century Macedonia), Poplicani (in northern France), and Bougres, Textores or Tisserands or ‘weavers’, Albigensians, and Cathars in Languedoc.3
Bogumilism has been called ‘a hopeless faith’. If so, its adherents showed exceptional perseverance in place of hope.
Boris X (r. 852–88), was toying with a Frankish alliance; and in 862 he met with Louis the German at Tulln on the Danube. But the scheme misfired; and peace with Byzantium in 865 caused Boris to accept baptism from the Patriarch of Constantinople. Boris, however, continued to intrigue with Rome, and a long letter containing 106 questions on Roman practice and theology evoked the famous Responsa of Pope Nicholas II. A further Byzantine advance then led to the Bulgarian mission of St Clement Slovensky (840–916) and the final drive to bring Bulgaria into the Orthodox fold. Clement, a fellow Macedonian, had accompanied Cyril and Methodius to Moravia, and was Cyril’s principal continuator in his work on the Slavonic liturgy. He was probably the true systematizer both of the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language and of the Cyrillic alphabet. He was the first bishop of the Bulgarian Church, and is buried in the monastery of St Pantaleinion at Ochrid. After 893, when pagan opposition to Christianity was crushed, the court of Tsar Simeon at Preslav hosted a veritable explosion of ecclesiastical learning for which Old Church Slavonic was now the vehicle. The auto-cephalous Bulgarian Church had seven sees: Ochrid, Pliska, Preska, Nesebar, Sardica (Sofia), Belgrade, and Preslav.
Bohemia, like Bulgaria, balanced for many years between Latin and Greek influences. In the ninth century the loyalties of the princes of Bohemia were pulled in two opposite directions—to the Franks and to the Moravians. Borivoj (r. 855–91) and his consort Ludmila, founders of the Hradéany chapel on the castle hill in Prague, were baptized into the Moravian (Slavonic) rite. Borivoj’s successor, Spytygner (r. 893–915), was baptized at Regensburg in Bavaria into the Latin rite. Vaclav (r. 900–29), better known as St Wenceslas, whose life and death are celebrated in equal measure in Latin and in Slavonic sources, reigned briefly at the height of the Magyar onslaught. He was murdered by his brother Boleslas I (r. 929–67), who was seeking a closer association with Saxony. In due course, as a martyr to growing German influence, he became the national saint of the Czechs. When the bishopric of Prague was founded in 967, it was subordinated to the metropolitan of Mainz, thereby reflecting the power of the new Ottonian empire. St Vojtech or Adalbert (956–97) was its second bishop.
Yet for more than a century, under the protection of the Přemyslid dynasty, the Slavonic rite survived in Bohemia alongside the Latin one. At the monastery of Sazanar in particular a rich school of Slavonic learning flourished, with contacts both in Kiev and in Croatia. In 1091, as an act of defiance, King Vratislav II submitted himself to a second Slavonic coronation by the last abbot of Sazanar. Thereafter, Latinization was virtually complete. Bohemia, a fief of the Empire and a client province of the German Church, was the Slav country most firmly drawn into the German orbit.
Poland, Bohemia’s eastern neighbour, edged toward Christendom in a similarly complex and prolonged process. In the ninth century, when the Wiátanie or ‘Vistulanian tribe’ owed allegiance to Moravia, the earliest Christian contacts were made with the mission of Cyril and Methodius. The chief of the Vistulanians appears to have accepted baptism in the Slavonic rite in 875; and traces of several Christian churches from that period have been discovered. The region of the upper Vistula, including Cracow, remained part of Bohemia until 990, and did not finally sever its connections with the Czech world until 1086. Poland’s early links with the Slavonic rite have not been emphasized; but it is arguable, as in Bohemia, that they persisted into the twelfth century.18
Most of the tribes to the north, who would form the core of the first Polish kingdom, followed a different course. They remained pagan to the middle of the tenth century, after which they were drawn directly into the sphere of the Latin Church. The fullest description of Slavdom in its final pagan days was composed by a Moorish Jew, Ibrahim-Ibn-Jakub, who was sent by the Caliph of Cordova on an embassy to central Europe c.965. He visited Prague and possibly Cracow:
The lands of the Slavs stretch from the Syrian Sea to the Ocean in the north… At present there are four kings: the king of the Bulgars; Bojeslav, King of Faraga, Boiema and Karako; Mesko, king of the north; and Nakon on the border of the West.
In general, the Slavs are violent and inclined to aggression. If not for the disharmony among them … no people could match their strength … They are specially energetic in agriculture … Their trade on land reaches to the Ruthenians and to Constantinople ….
Their women, when married, do not commit adultery. But a girl when she falls in love with some man or other, will go to him and quench her lust. If a husband marries a girl and finds her to be a virgin … he says to her, ‘If there were something good in you … you would certainly have found someone to take your virginity.’ Then he sends her back.
The lands of the Slavs are coldest of all. When the nights are moonlit and the days clear, the most severe frosts occur … When people breathe, icicles form on their beards, as if made of glass …
They have no bath-houses as such, but … they build a stone stove on which, when it is heated, they pour water. They hold a bunch of grass in their hands and waft the steam around. Then their pores open, and all excess matter escapes from their bodies. This hut is called al-istba…
Their kings travel in great carriages, on four wheels. From the corners of the carriage a cradle is slung on chains, so that the passenger is not shaken …
The Slavs wage war with the Byzantines, with the Franks and Langobards, and with other peoples …19
Interestingly enough, Ibrahim-Ibn-Jakub did not appear to regard the Rus as Slavs, presumably because they were still seen as Norsemen. What is not in doubt is that this diplomat from Muslim Spain looked on the exotic peoples of the European interior with the curiosity of a modern anthropologist surveying the tribes of Papua (see Appendix III, p. 1264).
In 965, in the same year as Ibrahim-Ibn-Jakub’s visit, Mieszko I, prince of the Polanie or Polanians, who lived on the River Warta, allied himself with the Czechs. As part of the alliance he married the Czech princess Dubravka and accepted Christian baptism. He was responding to the rise of the Saxon Empire after the defeat of the Magyars, and to pressures for accepting Christianity from Germany. The first Latin missionary bishopric was created at Poznañ in succession to an earlier see of the Slavonic rite, probably at Sandomierz. Dependence on the German Empire had been avoided. The ecclesiastical province of ‘Polonia’ was launched some thirty years later, in conjunction with a rapidly consolidating Polish state. When the Emperor Otto III visited the newly created metropolitan see at Gniezno in AD 1000, and embraced the Polish prince as his ‘friend and ally’, theWielkopolska (Great Połand) of Mieszko had already been joined to the Małopolska (Little Poland) of the south. Benedictine monasteries had been established at Miçdzyrzecz and at Tyniec. Bolesław Chrobry ‘the Brave’ (r. 992–1025), who stormed Prague in 1003 and notched his sword on the Golden Gate of Kiev in 1018, was rewarded by the Pope with Poland’s first royal crown. In 1037 a great pagan revolt marked the death throes of the old order. Thereafter the royal capital moved to Cracow; and the well-established Piast dynasty slowly turned Poland into the prime bastion of Catholicism in the East.
Hungary followed very closely in the path of Poland. Its first Christian contacts were with Byzantium. A captive Greek monk, Hierothos, was consecrated ‘Bishop of Turkia’ c.950. But the battle of the Lechfeld brought German influence in its wake. The Magyar Prince Géza (r. 972–97) was baptized with all his family into the Latin rite in 975. Géza’s son István (St Stephen, r. 997–1038) consolidated the imperial link by marrying a Bavarian princess and by accepting a royal crown from Rome. Stephen’s coronation at the new see of Esztergom (Gran) took place in 1001, only one year after Emperor Otto’s visit to Gniezno. The abbey at Pannonhalma opened in the same year as its sister house at Międzyrzecz. [BUDA]
All these primitive kingdoms were patrimonial states, where all rights and property were held by the ruling prince. The adoption of Christianity, which brought in literate clergy, has to be seen as a move to strengthen the infant monarchies.
Kievan Rus’ adopted Christianity from Byzantium in 988 as part of a comprehensive political settlement. Rus’ had been growing closer to Byzantium for over a century. Dnieper trade, Varangian raids, and the wars of the steppes had established contacts of all sorts. The Prince of Kiev, Volodymyr or Vladimir (r. 980–1015), was ‘a doughty heathen’, a fratricide, and a polygamist. But Orthodox baptism, and marriage to Anna, sister of the Emperor Basil II, was the necessary price for persuading the Emperor to hire the 6,000 warriors of the famous Varangian Guard. Though the Prince’s grandmother, St Olha (Olga), had been a Christian convert, he had weighed various alternatives before taking the same course. Envoys were sent abroad to report on the competing attractions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The envoys who reported on their impressions from the church of St Sophia in Constantinople carried the day, having been treated to the ecclesiastical equivalent of Liutprand’s audience with the Emperor. Only then did the Kievan Prince receive his christening. He ordered his people to the banks of the Dnieper, where they, too, were baptized en masse. He took the children of his nobles from their parents, and educated them in the new faith. Missionaries were later sent into the country to teach the variant of Orthodoxy popularized in Bulgaria by St Clement, together with the Old Church Slavonic liturgy, the Cyrillic alphabet, and loyalty to the Patriarch of Constantinople. Churches were built, heathen shrines demolished. Christianity reached Novgorod, Minsk, and Polotsk in the early eleventh century. Henceforth, Rus’ was to be an unshakeable member of Christendom. [NOVGOROD]
Volodymyr or Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, is frequendy likened to Charlemagne, creator of another vast but ephemeral realm.20 The parallel is apt enough, not least because both men became heroes of later national legends. Of course, Volodymyr the Rus was no more a Russian than Charlemagne the Frank had been a Frenchman. ‘Russia’ did not exist in his day, any more than ‘France’ existed in Charlemagne’s. Unfortunately, when the Russian Orthodox Church came on to the scene five centuries later, it laid monopoly claims to the Kievan heritage; and modern Russian propaganda has done everything in its power to suppress rival claims and traditions, notably among the Ukrainians. Meanwhile, just as Charlemagne was turned into the national hero of the chansons de geste, so the saintly ‘Prince Vladimir’ was turned into the central figure of medieval Russianbyliny. Roland, Oliver, and Bishop Turpin have their counterparts in Alyosha Popovich, Dobryna Nikitich, and the valiant peasant Ilya Popovich—the companions of the Krasnoe Solnyshko, ‘our beloved little Sunshine’. No one would have laughed more rumbustiously at this epithet than the very unsaintly saint himself (see Appendix III, p. 1249).
NOVGOROD
ANCIENT Novgorod lay in the centre of the forest zone, and hence was built almost entirely from wood—with wooden houses, wooden churches, wooden streets, wooden drains, even a wooden, birch-bark writing system. It began life as a trading-post on the banks of the River Volkov, at the northern end of the Baltic-Black Sea and Caspian-Baltic trade routes. Timber must always have been one of its staple commodities.
When Novgorod was comprehensively excavated in 1951–62, in one of the showpieces of medieval archaeology, the science of dendrochronology or ‘tree-ring dating’ was presented with one of its major challenges. The waterlogged ground had preserved the wooden remains in a remarkable state; and in thirteen seasons of excavation the team, led by A. V. Artikhovsky and B. A. Kolchin, opened up a site of 9,000 square metres, uncovering 1,150 log buildings. Most surprisingly, no fewer than 28 layers of wooden street-levels were identified on the former high street, from the top level 1 of AD 1462 to the earliest level 28 of 953. On average, the roadway had been renewed once every 18 years over 5 centuries, simply by laying a new layer of pine logs over the old ones damaged by cart-wheels and sledge runners. Extensive coin hoards, two from eighth-century Central Asia, showed that Novgorod’s far-flung trading contacts had never been seriously interrupted, even by the Mongol invasions. [DIRHAM]
Of 400 birch-bark letters, all but one Finnish specimen were written in an early form of Russian. In No. 17, which was found at level 5 (1409–27), the bailiff from an estate outside the city writes to his lord:
Mikhail makes obeisance to his lord, Timothy. The ground is prepared and we rhustsow. Come, sir, for everyone is ready, but we cannot have rye without your command.1
In a fragment of No. 37, found between levels 12 and 13 (1268–99), there is a proposal of marriage:
From Nikita to Ulyanitsa. Marry me. I want you, and you me. And Ignatio will act as witness.2
Walking the wooden streets of old Novgorod, whose inhabitants were slaughtered by the agents of Moscow, some people wonder how the world would have changed if Russia could have grown under the leadership of this peaceable republic.3 A Novgorodian Russia would clearly have been very different from the Muscovite Russia which triumphed over its rivals. But such thoughtsx are unhistorical. In any case, medieval archaeology offers no clue.
Scandinavia was not taken into the Christian fold without a struggle. A missionary bishopric, directed to the conversion of Scandinavia, had been active at Bremen since the 780s. But the Vikings’ way of life was not readily compatible with the Gospel, and a determined pagan party existed in the court of each of the three kingdoms. In Denmark, Harald Bluetooth (r. 940–86) accepted Christianity c.960, only to be expelled after founding the bishoprics of Aarhus and Schleswig. His son, Swein Forkbeard (r. 985–1014), once the leader of the heathen resistance, became the leading christianizer of the Danes. Under Canute the Great (r. 1016–35), who ruled England as well as Denmark, Anglo-Saxon missionaries set sail for Scandinavia.
In Norway, too, the drama took place in two acts. One attempt by Olaf Tryggvason (r. 995–1000) faltered, whilst the second, by Olaf Haraldson (r. 1016–28), succeeded through a mixture of bribery, coercion, and zealotry. This second Olav, who was killed defending his country against the Danes, was buried in the cathedral at Nidaros (Trondheim), and in due course was canonized as the national saint. In Sweden, Olaf Skutkonung (r. 995–1022) was baptized in 1008; but the resultant civil war between Christian and pagan factions continued for more than a century. Like St Olaf, St Eric of Sweden (d. 1160), who died in battle, and St Canute IV of Denmark (d. 1085), who was assassinated, came to be revered as martyrs of the faith. Metropolitan sees were established at Trondheim, Uppsala, and Lund in the 1140s by the then Cardinal-Legate, Nicholas Breakspeare, destined to be the only English Pope, [EIRIK]
The unsaintly character of all the national saint-kings from Wenceslas to Eric may well point to the superficiality of the conversions; but it also points to the process whereby Christianity was used to foster a sense of community within the state. Poland alone of the neophyte nations failed to produce a kingly saint or a martyr-king at this stage. Instead, it produced a martyr-bishop. Stanisław Szczepanowski (1030–79), the turbulent Bishop of Cracow, was literally cut to pieces in front of the altar by the knights of the king whom he had defied. His death, which set an uncanny precedent for the better-known martyrdom of St Thomas à Becket in England, indicated the growing power of the Latin Church, and the consequent conflicts between Church and State. In later days it was taken to symbolize the dismemberment of the sinful Polish kingdom into warring feudal fiefs.
Throughout this long second stage of conversions, the Greek and Latin Churches had coexisted in a state of strained separation. There was little co-operation; but equally there was no formal divorce. In the mid-eleventh century, however, the point of parting was reached. In Constantinople, the Patriarch Michael Kerullarios, promoted in 1043, entered into a dispute with the Byzantine governor of southern Italy. In the process he closed all the Latin churches in the capital, and wrote to the Latin bishops denouncing their schismatic practices, in particular their use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist. At the same time the Roman Papacy passed for five dramatic years into the assertive hands of Leo IX (1049–54), formerly Bruno von Egisheim, Bishop of Toul, and a cousin of the German emperor. Pope Leo was driven by a strong belief in his own mission, and was no more inclined to brook the pettiness of the Greek Patriarch than to tolerate the abuses of the bishops and kings in the West. In January 1054 he dispatched a legation to Constantinople under Cardinal Humbert de Moyenmoutier, and ordered them to obtain confirmation of his claims to papal supremacy. Not surprisingly, disaster ensued. The Patriarch refused to recognize the legates’ powers and pressed on with the publication of an aggressive manifesto, notwithstanding news of Pope Leo’s death. On 16 July the legates replied by excommunicating the Patriarch in a Bull which they placed on the hallowed altar of St Sophia itself. The insult was unforgivable. A synod of the Greek Church was convened to condemn the Latin heresies in creed and in practice, and to excommunicate the papal legates. It was the point of no return, [MISSA]
EIRIK
SOMETIME before 1075 King Svein Ulfsson, nephew of Canute the Great, received a man called Audun, who had sailed from Greenland to Denmark to present him with a polar bear. The episode is recalled in a saga called Audun’s Story. Shortly afterwards, the King received the German priest, Adam of Bremen, who was collecting information for his monumental history of the Archbishopric of Hamburg, under whose jurisdiction Scandinavia then fell. According to Adam, the King told him ‘that there was another island in that ocean which had been discovered by many and was called Vinland because vines grow wild there and yield excellent wine, and moreover, self-grown grain grows there in abundance’.1 It is the earliest European reference to North America. Archaeological evidence, notably from northern Newfoundland, confirms the fact that Norsemen did indeed found transatlantic settlements.2
The exploration of ‘the Glacial Sea’ extended over several centuries. Iceland was known to the Irish in the eighth century. Norse settlement began there c.870. Greenland was known some eighty years before it received its earliest colonists, c.985/6, the date which is also given to the first sighting of ‘Vinland’.3
The central figure in the explorations was the adventurer Eirik the Red (c.940–1002). Eirik left his home at Jaederen in Norway after a series of murders; but he then started a feud in Iceland when his slaves engineered a landslide to demolish a neighbour’s farm. Outlawed by the Icelandic Assembly at Thorness, he sailed away to found a colony on the western coast of an island ‘which he called Greenland, so that others would be tempted to go there’. This was fifteen years before Iceland officially adopted Christianity in AD 1000. Eirik’s younger son, Leif Ericsson ‘the Lucky’, sailed on from Greenland c.1001 to test reports of land to the west, and returned with descriptions of Helluland (‘Slab-land’, probably Baffin Island), Markland (‘Forest Land’, probably Labrador), and the elusive Vinland, ‘the Land of Grapes’. It was Tyrkir the German, a member of Leif’s crew, who found the vines; and it was Thorfinn Karlsefni, the wealthy second husband of Eirik’s daughter-in-law, Gutrid, who twice organized expeditions to site permanent settlements on the American shore. Eric’s bastard daughter Freydis also visited Vinland twice. On the first occasion, she was said to have repulsed an Indian attack by baring her breasts. On the second, she murdered all her companions. In the autumn of 1009, Gutrid, Karlsefni’s wife, and widow of Eirik’s elder son, Thorstein, gave birth in Vinland to a boy called Snorri, the first Euro-American.
The exact location of Vinland has caused endless scholarly headaches. The consensus now leans towards Newfoundland and a site at L’Anse-aux-Meadows. The vinber or ‘wineberries’ found by Tyrkir may well have been wild cranberries and the ‘self-sown wheat’ lyme grass. The subject has produced much ‘Skandiknavery’. Among the sensations one must list a runic inscription for M1 or AD 1001 carved by some joker on a boulder at Martha’s Vineyard in 1920, and Yale’s Vinland Map produced in 1965.4
The main sources remain the Norse sagas, especially The Graenlandinga Saga (c.1190) Eirik’s Saga (c.1260) and the Islandingabòk (c.1127), a history of the Icelanders commissioned by a bishop who was the great grandson of Snorri Karsefnisson.5
Except for Iceland, the outermost Norse colonies did not last. Vinland was abandoned after a few decades. Greenland, once prosperous from the trade in walrus ivory, furs, and snowy falcons, declined in the fourteenth century. Rickets and a deteriorating climate took their toll. The last ship from Greenland reached Iceland in 1410. ‘The last Norse Greenlander died some time later, “unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown”.’ His frozen remains, or those of one of his last companions, were discovered near the Greenland shore in 1586 by the Elizabethan explorer John Davys (1550–1605). Like Eirik the Red and Leif Ericsson exactly 600 years before, Davys was sailing to the far north-west in search of his fortune in mysterious lands beyond the ‘Great Passage’.7
The schism between East and West, Christendom’s major scandal, has never been repaired. From 1054 onwards there were not only two supposedly universal.
MISSA
THE Christian liturgy has never been static. The Divine Office of hymns, psalms, lessons, homilies, responsories, canticles, and collects began to crystallize from the fifth century. The Canonical Hours, which enabled monks to spread out their recital of the 150 psalms, once recited daily, were instituted by St Benedict. Prudentius, Bishop of Troyes (d. 861) is credited with an early Breviary or summary of approved liturgical texts.
The most solemn of the Christian sacraments, the Mass or missa, assumed definitive form slightly later. Variously known as the Eucharist or ‘Rite of Thanksgiving’, as the ‘Communion’, or as the commemoration of ‘the Lord’s Supper’, it was customarily separated from the rest of the Divine Office. The earliest Missal or ‘Order of the Mass’ dates from the tenth century. The central act of Communion occurs when the priest consecrates bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ, and offers them to the communicants. From the thirteenth century to 1965, the Roman Church restricted the chalice of wine to the priestly celebrant. But now, as originally, it offers ‘Communion in Both Kinds’. The theological implications of the Eucharist, notably the Thomist doctrine of transubstantiation, caused immense controversy during the Reformation.
The custom of setting key parts of the Mass to music had far-reaching consequences. The Propers, or items whose words vary according to the occasion, were usually recited or chanted. They include the Introit, the Gradual, the Offertory, and the Communion Anthem. But the Ordinaries, whose text was invariable, opened the way for elaborate musical inventions. The Ordinaries include: the Kyrie Eleison (‘Lord Have Mercy’), an ancient imprecation borrowed from sun worship; the Gloria in Excelsis Deo (‘Glory to God on High’), a hymn usually omitted during Lent; theCredo or Nicene Creed; the Sanctus (‘Holy, Holy, Holy’), an adorational hymn which prefaces the Communion; the Agnus Dei (‘0 Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world’); and finally the Dismissal, Ite, missa est (‘Go in peace; the Mass is ended’).
Setting the Ordinaries for two or more voices, and then for choirs with instrumental accompaniment, presented the principal challenge of medieval polyphony. A complete Mass cycle was composed by Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), and similar compositions were common by the Renaissance. The supreme masters were undoubtedly Palestrina (d. 1594) and his contemporary, William Byrd (1543–1623), a Catholic in Anglican service. Palestrina’s highly original Missa Papae Marcellae (1555) followed the instructions of the Council of Trent in giving maximum clarity to the words, [CANTUS]
The impact of the Mass on musical history was incalculable. Just as incantation had transformed the spiritual and aesthetic effect of the liturgy, so the choral and instrumental arrangements of the Mass profoundly influenced Europe’s evolving musical tradition. ‘The liturgical text forms the portal through which music enters into the cultural history of the Western Christian world.’
The stupendous Mass in B minor (1738) of J. S. Bach initiated a stage where musical performances of the Mass could be divorced from religious ceremony. Haydn wrote fourteen such masses, among them the Drum Mass (1796) and the Wind-Band Mass (1802). Mozart wrote eighteen, including the sublime, unfinished Requiem (1791). Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in D (1823) may be regarded as the zenith of the series, to be followed in Romantic style by those of Liszt, Gounod, Bruckner, and Janáček. In the twentieth century the Mass survived both the dilution of Christian belief and the disintegration of traditional musical form. Frederick Delius composed a choral Mass of Life (1909) based on anti-religious texts by Nietzsche. Stravinsky’s Mass for Chorus and Wind Instruments (1948) experiments with neo-polyphonic techniques modelled on Machaut.2
Yet sung and unsung masses can be heard every day in Catholic and Orthodox churches around the world. Both the religious tradition and the musical genres descended from it are very much alive.
Christian Empires; there were two supposedly universal and orthodox Christian Churches. Three hundred years earlier, the principal line of division in Europe lay between the Christian lands of the south and the heathen lands of the north. From now on, it lay between the Catholic lands of the West and the Orthodox lands of the East. (See Map 3.)
1054–1268
Whereas, in the age of the Vikings and Magyars, it was the West and Centre of Europe that had borne the brunt of the turmoil, it was the East that sustained the havoc when first the Seljuk Turks and then the Mongols appeared on the scene. Indeed, from the second half of the eleventh century onwards, Latin Christendom entered an era of reform and revitalization. In that same period the Eastern Empire entered a stage of irreversible decline. As shown by the Crusades, the two movements were not unrelated.
At the time of the Schism between East and West, the Byzantine Empire was preoccupied with a series of petty upheavals caused by wars on the frontier and strife in the palace. Indeed, the revolts of generals, the ambitions of the Patriarch, and the intrigues of the empresses proved no less disruptive than the Normans in Italy, the Pechenegs on the Danube, and the Seljuk Turks in Armenia. The death of the ageing Theodora in 1057, which ended the Macedonian dynasty, distracted the Empire at the moment it faced its greatest challenge.
The Saljuqs or Seljuks had crossed the Oxus in 1031, gaining mastery over Persia in the 1040s, Armenia in the 1060s, and Jerusalem in 1070. They came within a hair’s breadth of capturing Baghdad. Their sultans, Tughril Beg (r. 1038–63), the ‘Reviver of Islam’, and Alp Arslan (r. 1063–72), infused the fighting spirit which mobilized a motley following. Their entourage included Persian administrators, Greek advisers, and a rich company of philosophers, mathematicians, and poets:
Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me, singing in the Wilderness—
And wilderness is Paradise enow.
’Tis all a chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for pieces plays,
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), whose Persian quatrains would be turned in translation into one of the favourite items of English literature, served as astronomer and calendarist at the Seljuk court under Alp Arslan, the architect of their greatest triumph. On 19 August 1071, at Manzikert near Lake Van, the Seljuks turned a border contest into an imperial rout. The Byzantine army was utterly destroyed. The Emperor, Romanus IV Diogenes, was captured. The Empire’s heartland in Asia Minor was overrun, serving thenceforth as the base for the Turkish emirate of Rum. The Empire’s population and economic resources were drastically reduced.
Byzantium never fully recovered. From now on, the emperors were seeking to defend the shrinking foreground of Fortress Constantinople. The Seljuks, too, had shot their bolt. They soon lost the guardianship of Jerusalem to the Shi‘ite Fatimids of Egypt; and the wars of rival emirs gave the Empire some respite. The energetic young Emperor Alexius I Comnenus (r. 1081–1118) held the line by a mixture of valour and dubious financial expedients, such as seizing the Church’s treasure. He repulsed the Normans from Greece, and recovered a valuable stretch of the Pontic and Aegean shore. But a return to the status quo ante was out of the question. Under Manuel I (r. 1143–80), a certain ‘Comnenian Renaissance’ bloomed, especially in scholarship, theology, and architecture. Grandiose schemes for reuniting with Rome or for conquering Egypt came to nought. The growing influence of the Latins, with whom Manuel packed his court, led to increasing friction, especially with the Venetians. The degenerate Andronicus Comnenus (r. 1183–5) was tortured to death by a mob which followed his own example. The façade of greatness was still intact. Constantinople was still the richest and most civilized city of Christendom: its trade, its ceremonies, its intense religious devotions continued in full swing. But the substance was ebbing away. Its body politic awaited the shock which in 1204 would all but kill it dead.
Byzantium’s distress produced serious repercussions in the Orthodox Slav lands. There was neither the will nor the means whereby the Greek Patriarch could exercise the same control over Bulgars, Serbs, or Kievans as the Papacy was now beginning to exercise in the West. In the century after Manzikert, the Balkans descended once more into turmoil. The Pechenegs, who reached the walls of Constantinople for a second time in 1090, were not subdued until 1122. Long campaigns had to be fought in the north-west to hold Serbia from the Magyars. In 1186 the Bulgars broke free once more to found their ‘Second Empire’.
Kievan Rus’ was largely left to its own devices. Jaroslav the Wise (r. 1019–54), successor to St Volodymyr, had taken Red Ruthenia from the Poles, had defeated the Pechenegs, and had even sent a major naval expedition against Constantinople. But on his death, the state disintegrated into warring principalities—Halicz and Volhynia in the west; Kiev, Turov, Chernigov in the south; Novgorod, Polotsk, and Smolensk in the north; Tver, Vladimir-Suzdal, and Ryazan on the upper Volga. The dissensions of Rus’ were cleverly fanned by the Byzantines, and might well have been exploited by the neighbouring Poles had the Polish kingdom itself not fallen likewise into an extended period of fragmentation after 1138. The primitive kingdoms of the Slavs stood in considerable disarray long before the arrival of the Mongols.
Divergences among the east Slavs now became evident. Kiev remained a commercial and religious centre; but it was exposed to the whims of the Pechenegs (Patzinaks) and Polovtsians (Cumans) on the steppes, and had all but lost political control. In the twelfth century the name Ukraina, meaning ‘On the edge’ or ‘the frontier’, was first applied to the lands round Kiev. Halicz (Galicia), first noted in 1140, and Volhynia passed under the Romanowicz dynasty. Daniel Romanowicz (r. 1235–65) received his crown from a papal legate, but later renounced the Catholic connection. According to one chronicle, he was urged to side with the people in suppressing the boyars. ‘You cannot eat the honey’, he was told, ‘until you have killed the bees.’
The north-eastern principalities of Rus’ attracted an important peasant migration into the forest zone of the upper Volga, which helped the growth of cities. The settlement of Moscow on the River Moskva was first recorded in 1146. In 1169 Andrei Bogulyubsky, Prince of Vladimir, was strong enough to sack Kiev. In 1185 Prince Igor of Sever led a famous expedition against the Polovtsians. The city of Novgorod began its career as an independent republic from 1126. Its veche, an assembly of its free citizens, elected both the chief administrator and the archbishop. It set the terms of the contract which limited the powers of the ruling prince. Huge territories in the north, as far as the monastery of St Michael the Archangel on the White Sea, were subject to Novgorod’s writ. Alexander Nevsky (c.1220–63), Prince of Vladimir and Novgorod, repelled both the Swedes on the Neva (1240) and the Teutonic knights on the ice of Lake Peipus. [NOVGOROD]
Another clear beneficiary of Byzantium’s decline was the fledgeling kingdom of Hungary. Protected to the north by the Carpathians, and safely distanced both from Constantinople and from the German Empire, Hungary could consolidate its hold on the Danube basin without serious opposition. In 1004 it took control of Transylvania, and after 1089 of Croatia and Dalmatia, opening an important corridor to the sea. In the twelfth century it absorbed the beautiful mountain-girt province of Bosnia. In all the peripheral territories, including Upper Hungary (Slovakia), Magyar nobles of the Latin faith were established on vast estates largely inhabited by Slavs, Germans, or Romanians. On the eastern borders, a lengthy military zone was permanently settled by conquered Cumans. Paganism was eradicated. Under the ‘soldier king’, St Ladislas or Laszlo (r. 1077–95) and his nephew Coloman I or Kálmán (r. 1095–1116), both of whom had close family ties with Constantinople, the pioneering tasks of St Stephen were concluded. As early as 1222, in the ‘Golden Bull’ of Andreas II, the Hungarian king confirmed the immunity of the nobles and high clergy, who formed a national assembly armed with the formal right of resistance.
The Byzantine retreat also led to important changes in Transcaucasia. The Bagratid state of Greater Armenia, based on Ani near Kars, which had flourished since the ninth century, was submerged by the Seljuks. Many Armenians were driven into exile, some as far afield as Poland. A rump state of ‘Little Armenia’ was set up in the south, in the former province of Cilicia; and it survived for three centuries more.22 But Georgia broke free: under David the Renovator (r. 1089–1125), the Seljuks were repulsed from Tbilisi. Under Queen Tamara (r. 1184–1213) a brilliant court culture flourished, the native Christian element blending with Turkish, Persian, and Arab infusions. The poet Shot’ha Rust’aveli, who was educated in Greece, gained international renown. His epic poem, Knight in a Tiger Skin, dedicated to Tamara, has been optimistically classified as ‘the first breath of the Renaissance’.23
Medieval society remained overwhelmingly rural. Life was centred on the feudal estates, and on the timeless relations of lord and serf. The emergence of cities in embryo, therefore, did not change the overall scene; but it was important, not merely for the future but for the organization of trade and the spread of culture.
Walled cities, like walled castles, reflected the insecurities of the countryside. Their ramparts, their gates and towers were designed to protect an oasis of safety. But they also fostered distinct social communities, which increasingly sought to give themselves a separate legal and political identity. They coalesced around ports and river-crossings, around markets, or around the residences of counts and bishops. Many nascent towns failed and relapsed into obscurity; but by the twelfth century several regions of Europe were beginning to show pockets of vigorous urbanization. The Italian port cities of Venice, Pisa, and Genoa led the way. They were soon rivalled by the cities of Lombardy and of the Rhineland, and by clusters of textile towns—Florence and Siena in Tuscany, Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent in Flanders. London and Paris grew for political as well as for economic reasons. The largest of them had populations of 50,000 or more, and rising. [FIESTA]
Urban society was marked by the formation of a class of burghers, who organized themselves against the more numerous artisans and rootless elements. The important thing was that most of these city-dwellers in the West freed themselves from the feudal relations prevailing beyond the city walls. ‘Freedom became the legal status of the bourgeoisie … no longer a personal privilege, but a territorial one, inherent in the urban soil.’ Slavery on the Muslim model, however, was common, especially in Italy. Special charters were issued to cope with the influx of Jews brought in by Mediterranean trade, [GHETTO]
Trade patterns were determined by a handful of well-tried routes. Venice and Genoa took over from Constantinople as the organizers of trade with the Levant. The North Sea routes were built up in response to the demand for English wool. Lombardy and the Rhineland stood at either end of the transalpine corridor. From 1180 the Counts of Champagne established an early form of free-trade zone, whose fairs became the clearing-house of international commerce, [GOTTHARD] [HANSA]
In the second half of the eleventh century, in many parts of Western Europe, a series of seemingly unconnected innovations set long-lasting processes in motion. Institutions were starting to gel; temporary expedients turned themselves into plans for a long-term future.
On 14 April 1059 Pope Nicholas II decreed that papal elections should be conducted by the College of Cardinals. The move was designed to assert the independence of the Papacy and to avoid the scenes of the previous year, when two rival popes had been appointed by two rival factions. For centuries, the traditional appointment of popes by ‘the people and clergy of Rome’ had left them at the mercy of local politics. More recently, the German emperors had assumed the practice of nominating candidates. Now the Papacy was taking the necessary steps to free itself from external control. The Roman Curia, the papal court and government, was first mentioned shortly afterwards, [CONCLAVE]
In August 1059, at Melfi in Apulia, Robert Guiscard, fourth of twelve sons of Tancred d’Hauteville, was invested by the Pope with the Duchy of Apulia and Calabria, together with the ‘future’ Duchy of Sicily. In return, if he could seize the allocated lands, Duke Robert was to pay the Pope a fee of twelve pence per ploughland. At the time, the treaty represented just another twist in the Papacy’s tortuous diplomacy. Ever since their arrival in Calabria in 1017, the Norman adventurers had been opposed by Rome; indeed, in the middle of the Schism with Byzantium in 1054, having marched south with a German army, Pope Leo IX had been the Normans’ prisoner. But now Nicholas II decided to do business with them. What he could not have foreseen was that the d’Hautevilles would put their plans so promptly into practice. They crossed the Straits of Messina in 1060 and started the systematic conquest of Sicily from the Saracens. Within a decade they had both captured Palermo and driven the Byzantines from their last Italian foothold at Bari. In due course the Norman conquests in the south were united into one ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’, which survived until the days of Garibaldi.
FIESTA
IN AD 1000 the Doge of Venice took the title of Duke of Dalmatia after capturing the strongholds of the Adriatic pirates at Curzola and Lagosta. It was Venice’s first step to becoming a naval power. The ceremony of the Sposalizio del Mar, the ‘Wedding of the Doge and the Sea’, where a regatta of bedecked gondolas parades down the Grand Canal, began that same year. It used to be the centrepiece of Venice’s annual Ascension Day Fair, the Sensa, but now forms part of the Regata Storica in September.
The European calendar is packed with festivals that feature every sort of procession, masked parade, dance, fair, or games. Many of them, such as the Bloemen Curso in Haarlem, the Midsommer in Sweden, or the beer-swilling Oktoberfest in Munich, celebrate the passing of the seasons. The days of Fasching which occur throughout Germany and Austria, like the fire-burning Dozynki in Poland, are pagan survivals. France’s fêtes des vignerons are the wine-growers’ equivalent of harvest festivals.
Many others have religious connections. The Carnaval or ‘Farewell to the Flesh’, held on Mardi Gras or ‘Pancake Tuesday’, is best known in Nice. It marks the last day before the fast of Lent. The Easter Semana Santa in Seville sees penitents parade in high-pointed black hats. Corpus Christi is another day for general Christian witness, as are Whitsun and the Feast of the Blessed Virgin (15 August). At Sainte-Marie de la Mer near Arles, gypsies from many countries carry their icon of the Virgin into the sea. The procession of the Holy Blood at Bruges and the Ommegangin Brussels honour local relics.
Many fiestas take the form of public contests. Such are the highland games in Scotland, the course à la cocarde in the Roman arenas at Arles and Nîmes, the bull-running at Pamplona, and the magnificent horseback races of the Palio at Siena.
Most often, however, Europeans set out to remember the dramatic events which, like the Sposalizio, pepper the history of their cities:
Moros y Cristianos |
Alcoy (Alicante) |
the Christian conquest of 1227 |
Lajkonik |
Cracow (Poland) |
the Mongol raids (13th c.) |
Giostra del Saracino |
Arezzo (Italy) |
(jousting): the Saracen wars |
Jeanne d’Arc |
Orléans (France) |
the siege of 1428 |
Fürstenhochzeit |
Landshut (Bavaria) |
the Bavarian-Polish wedding of 1475 |
Escalade |
Geneva (CH) |
the Savoyard assault of 1602 |
Guy Fawkes |
England |
Gunpowder Plot, 1605 |
Up Helly Aa |
Lerwick (Shetland) |
Viking rule, 751 |
Meistertrunk |
Rothenberg (Germany) |
the siege of 1631 |
Vikingspillene |
Frederikssund (Denmark) |
discovery of a Viking ship, 1950 |
Old or new, fiestas are annual events. They cement local pride to the continuity of the passing centuries.1
Yet nothing is so grand as the festivals and parades which accompany military victories. In June 1940 the Wehrmacht marched symbolically through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Five years later, in Red Square, the Wehrmacht’s banners were piled up high at Stalin’s feet. In the Allied countries, though not in Germany, 11 November has been honoured for decades with solemn pomp as ‘Remembrance Day’.
GHETTO
IN many Italian cities, walled and gated quarters reserved for Jews had existed at least since the eleventh century. They resulted from the concordance of view between the municipal magistrates, who demanded segregation, and the Jews’ own religious laws, which forbade residence among Gentiles. In Venice, the Jewish quarter was called // Ghetto, either from a contraction of borghetto or ‘little town’ or from a deformation of the gietto or ‘foundry’ which had once existed there. The name came to be used across Europe. Major ghettos were created in Prague, Frankfurt, Trieste, and in Rome, where the ghetto was maintained from 1536 to 1870.1
Formal ghettos were unknown, however, in the Jews’ main refuge in Poland-Lithuania, where royal charters of protection were in force from 1265. Several Polish cities, including Warsaw, enforced statutes de non tolerandis Judaeis, which excluded Jews from districts under municipal jurisdiction. (Nobles, peasants, and officers of the Crown were similarly excluded.) The effect was to channel Jewish residence on to noble-owned land in the immediate vicinity of the city gates. Small Jewish shtetln or ‘townlets’ also grew up under noble patronage alongside manorial centres in the countryside. The Jews of Poland-Lithuania possessed both local autonomy and, in their Council of the Four Lands, their own central parliament.2
No Jews were permitted to reside in Russia prior to the partitions of Poland. After the partitions, Catherine II turned Russia’s ex-Polish provinces into the core of a huge Jewish ‘pale of settlement’ (see Appendix III, p. 1311). But closed ghettos of the Western type did not reach Eastern Europe until the Nazi advance of 1939–41.
To escape from the ghetto was no simple matter. Would-be escapees had to defy the laws and customs both of the Gentile and of the Jewish communities, and to risk dire penalties. Until modern times, formal conversion was often the only practical way out.
Before the conquest of Sicily was complete, the Papacy decided to back another Norman adventurer. In 1066 William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, was sent the banner of St Peter to bless his expedition against England. From Rome’s point of view this was another move to build up a body of papal supporters who were independent of the Empire. From William’s point of view it was a means of persuading his troops to fight. (He later repudiated the papal claim to a deal similar to the one agreed over Sicily.) But once again fortune favoured the venture. Having waited many weeks to cross the Channel, the Normans attacked the Anglo-Saxon army waiting at Hastings. Harold of England, having been given the time to return from the north, where he had defeated his other rival, Harold of Norway, was confident of further success. But on 28 September he died in battle, pierced through the eye by a Norman arrow. William, now the Conqueror, was crowned in Westminster Abbey at Christmas. The kingdom of England, like Sicily, was parcelled out among the Norman knights and turned into a model feudal kingdom. (The English claim that it has never been conquered since.)
In March 1075 a new Pope, Gregory VII (1073–85), enunciated the twenty-seven propositions of his Dictatus Papae (the Pope’s Supremacy). He claimed supreme legislative and judicial power within Christendom, together with the right to depose all princes, both temporal and spiritual. Soon afterwards, in synod, he formally ordered the excommunication of all secular rulers who invested candidates for church appointments without reference to ecclesiastical authority. The Pope, formerly Hildebrand, a Tuscan monk and the principal adviser of the preceding popes, had been elected by the cardinals in the new manner. The Emperor, Henry IV (r. 1056–1106), had not been notified, let alone consulted. A major conflict between Empire and Papacy was unavoidable. It was the start of the Investiture Contest.
Despite the high-flown legal and theological language in which it was conducted, the Investiture Contest was a straightforward struggle for power. Was the Emperor to control the Pope, or the Pope to control the Emperor? The agreed theory was simple: Latin Christendom was supported by two pillars of authority—the temporal, headed by the Emperor, and the spiritual, headed by the Pope. But the relationship between the two was open to interpretation. In the imperial view, the Pope should have confined his attentions to the spiritual sphere. In the papal view, just as earth was below heaven, so the Emperor should submit to the will of the Pope. The propositions of Hildebrand’s Dictatus were uncompromising:
2. The Roman Pontiff alone merits the Catholic or ‘universal’ title.
3. The Pontiff alone can depose and absolve bishops.
12. The Pontiff is permitted to depose emperors.
16. The Pontiff alone can convene a General Synod.
20. No one can condemn a decision of the Holy See.
HANSA
As German colonists and crusaders moved eastwards along the Baltic shore, it was natural that commercial interests would follow. Equally, in a region emerging from the Viking Age, it was only to be expected that merchants established in Baltic and North Sea ports would band together for protection. The first such hansa or ‘commercial association’ was established at Wisby on the island of Gotland in 1161 under the name of the ‘United Gotland Travellers of the Holy Roman Empire’. Within a century, a far-flung confederation of am-see staten or ‘free cities of the sea’ had developed from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Finland.
The Bund van der dudeschen hanse or ‘Hanseatic League’ rose to the peak of its influence in the course of the 14th century. It comprised a series of constituent leagues, whose delegates met regularly to co-ordinate policy. The most important of these was the ‘Wendish-Saxon Quarter’ based on Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, Wismar, and Rostock. The Westphalian group was headed by Cologne, the Livonian group by Wisby, later by Reval. The three main groups formed the Drittel or ‘Triangle’ at the core of the organization. Each of the member cities possessed dependent towns known as vororte or ‘suburbs’, whilst the League as a whole established a chain ofkontore or ‘foreign offices’ from which all members could benefit. Five key offices were maintained: at Bruges—the main terminus of the transalpine trade-route to Venice, at the ‘Peterhof’ in Novgorod (from 1229), at the ‘Steelyard’ in London (1237), at the ‘German Bridge’ in Bergen (1343), and at the annual herring market at Falsterbo in Skania.
Hansa membership was confined neither to Germany nor the littoral. At various times, over two hundred cities belonged to the network. They stretched from Dinant in the West to Oslo in the North and Narva in the East. Major inland members included Brunswick, Magdeburg, Breslau, and Cracow.
The Hanseatic League possessed no formal constitution and no central government. But a body of law and custom accumulated; and from 1373 the Free Imperial City of Lübeck was confirmed as the home of the court of appeal and as the most frequent meeting-place for the League’s triennial Hansetage or ‘General Assemblies’. The Law of Lübeck was adopted by many member cities.
In its early days, the League aimed to consolidate the legal rights of anchorage, storage, residence, and local immunity, which its members required to conduct their business. It was also concerned to stabilize currency and to facilitate the means of payment. (The English wordsterlingderives from ‘Easterling’, an epithet widely applied to Hansa merchants.)
Yet the pursuit of mercantile interests soon involved politics. The League’s original weapon lay in the Verhansung or ‘commercial boycott’ of its enemies. But it was gradually obliged to levy taxes and to raise naval forces, first to suppress pirates and then to contest the policies of established kingdoms, especially Denmark. An alliance between Norway, Sweden, and the Hansa was provoked by the Danish sacking of Wisby in 1361. In that first Danish War, the League was heavily defeated. But in the second war of 1368–9, the troops of the League captured Helsingborg, destroyed Copenhagen, and occupied the Sound. By the Treaty of Stralsund (1370), Denmark was forced to concede that no Danish King could be crowned without the League’s approval and the confirmation of its privileges, [SUND]
Thereafter, the slow decline of the Hanseatic League was the result both of economic and of political factors. The Baltic herring shoals mysteriously relocated to the North Sea in the fifteenth century. In the same period, northern Europe’s centre of commercial gravity was shifting to the Netherlands. The Hansa met increasing difficulty in asserting itself against aggressive modern states such as England, Prussia, and Muscovy. The closing of the Peterhof in Novgorod in 1494 was a sign of the times, as was the closing of the Steelyard in London in 1598. The Hansa received little support from the fragmented authority of the Holy Roman Empire. During the Thirty Years War it was reduced to an active membership of three—Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen—who held their last General Assembly in 1669. From then on, the Hansa name was connected only with the independence of those three cities, which stayed apart from the German Customs Union until 1889.1
The legacy of the Hansa long outlived its demise. Over the centuries it had created a way of life whose solid virtues were cemented into every stone of its bustling and elegant cities. To be Hanseatic was to belong to an inimitable, international civilization based on shared values and priorities. Great cities such as Hamburg, Danzig (Gdansk), or Riga were not to share a common political destiny. But they retained a strong sense of their common origins. The citizens of Hamburg still take pride in registering their cars under the ancient municipal formula of ‘HH’—Hansestadt Hamburg. Bremeners display ‘HB’; Lübeckers ‘HL’, Rostockers ‘HRO’.
Nazi ideology naturally made great efforts to appropriate the Hanseatic tradition. In a famous Grotemeyer painting of 1942, for example, a medieval wagon train sets out along the Elbe from Hamburg as if to conquer Germany’s Lebensraum in the East.2 But this was a gross distortion. In German History, the Hanseatic tradition stands in stark contrast to the Prussianism, nationalism, and imperialism which supplanted it. In European history, it shines as a beacon for all who seek a future based on sturdy local autonomy, international co-operation, and mutual prosperity.
22. The Church of Rome has never erred, and as Scripture attests, can never err in the future …
23. No one who opposes the Church of Rome can be considered Catholic.
27. The Pontiff can release the vassals of unjust men from their oath of loyalty…25
At first sight, since the Pope had no means of enforcement at his command, it appeared that the Emperor’s position was the stronger one. In practice, since many bishops resented their dependence on secular patrons, and since many barons resented their dependence on prince or emperor, the centrifugal forces of the feudal order worked to the Pope’s advantage. In the long run, the Contest ended in stalemate and compromise; but not before, in the first round, the Emperor suffered comprehensive humiliation.
Hildebrand’s challenge provoked an unholy brawl. At the Emperor’s command, the bishops of the Empire excommunicated the Pope. The Pope promptly excommunicated the Emperor, releasing the Emperor’s subjects from their allegiance. The German barons thereon rebelled, and chose Rudolf of Swabia as their ‘anticaesar’. Henry chose penitence. Crossing the Mont Cenis in winter with his wife and child, he sought out Hildebrand in the lonely castle of Canossa. There he stood barefoot for three days in the snow, dressed in rags and begging the Pope for forgiveness. On the fourth day Hildebrand relented, and Henry threw himself at his feet, crying ‘Holy Father, spare me!’ But the dramatics of Canossa achieved nothing; Henry soon returned to his habit of lay investiture. After a long civil war in Germany, and Henry’s second excommunication, a synod of imperial bishops met at Brixen and elected an ‘antipope’, Clement III. The West now had two Popes and two Emperors. In 1083–4 the imperial party captured Rome, with Hildebrand holed up in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Robert Guiscard saw them off with a Saracen army, which put Rome to the sack. Hildebrand died in exile. Henry died in 1106, but not before his second wife Adelaide had publicly laid charges against him with the Church. The Concordat of Worms in 1122 called a truce in the wrangles, with Pope and Emperor both granted a hand in investiture. [MARSTON]
In 1075 the city of Pisa sought papal approval for its municipal code of laws, the consuetudine di mare. They were confirmed by an imperial patent six years later. As part of the arrangement, the local Duke of Tuscany renounced all jurisdiction within the city, and undertook to name no new marquis in the region without the Pisans’ consent. At the time Pisa was simply taking precautions against the brewing conflict between Pope and Emperor; but it was pioneering the process whereby leading cities could establish communal independence. Pisa had grown rich from the plunder of the campaigns against the Saracens in Sicily and Sardinia, as reflected in the marble splendours of its cathedral with the leaning baptistery tower (c.1089). In due course it was subdued by its maritime rival, Genoa, and absorbed by its landward neighbour, Florence. But the growth of wealthy city communes, replete with constitutions, military forces, and civic pride, was a feature of ensuing centuries. In France, Le Mans, St Quentin, and Beauvais were self-regulating cities by the end of the eleventh century. In Flanders, the charter
MARSTON
OLD Marston happens to be the nearest medieval parish to where this book is being written. It has had a continuous history for nearly 900 years. A chapel on the site was granted to the Austin Priory of St Frideswide in Oxford in 1122; and it was raised to the status of a parish in the following century. In 1451 a papal bull joined it to the neighbouring parish of Headington in an arrangement which lasted until 1637. For much of the modern period, the living lay in the gift of the lordship of Headington.
In its long history, Marston has seen few momentous events. This ‘marsh village’, three miles from the city of Oxford, had no interesting features other than the Marston Ferry, which plied across the River Cherwell from 1279 until the 1960s. At its greatest extent prior to the growth of the modern city suburbs, the village was inhabited by forty or fifty households, who worked some 600 acres of arable land and possessed some 200 horses and cattle and 800 sheep. After 1655, when the two main fields were enclosed for pasture, the population declined. During the English Civil War, Marston was occupied by the Parliamentary forces besieging the King’s headquarters in Oxford. The Parliamentary commander, Sir Thomas Fairfax, was billeted in 1643 with the Croke family at Marston Manor House, where he received a visit from Oliver Cromwell. There was no school in the village before 1816, when a boarding-house was established for paying pupils. The elementary school opened in 1851. The only charitable foundation in the parish was created in 1671 by the will of Mary Brett, widow, who left a house and a parcel of land worth 22s. 6d. for providing bread for the poor. The only inhabitant of the parish to achieve national fame was a fox-terrier bitch called ‘Trump’, who was purchased in the hamlet of Elsfield in 1815. Trump’s new master, the sporting parson, Revd. Jack Russell, used her to found the canine breed that bears his name.1
The Parish Church of St Nicholas, Marston, built in Late Perpendicular Gothic, is described as ‘unpretentious’.2 There is a low west tower with battlemented parapet. Only tiny portions of the original fabric survive. Most of the stonework dates from the fifteenth century, as restored in 1883. The plain oak furnishing of the interior is largely Elizabethan or Jacobean.
A list of officiating clergy from c. 121 Oto 1991 hangs on a board in the nave. Despite the interval between 1529 and 1637 when Marston was served by non-resident curates, the list conveys a strong sense of continuity. The name of the earliest recorded priest is Osbert, son of Hereward (c.1210). John de Bradeley (1349) died in the Black Death. Robert Kene (1397–8) was the first priest to use a surname. Thomas Fylldar (1529), a Dominican, was the last Catholic priest before the Reformation. John Allen (1637–85), an appointee of Archbishop Laud, served the reconstituted parish for forty-eight years. So, too, did his Edwardian successor, John Hamilton Mortimer (1904–52).
All over Europe, tens of thousands of church parishes form a network of territorial authority, which is often much older and more continuous than that of the civil power. They answer to the bishop as opposed to the Crown. In England, they pre-dated the counties. They coincide in large measure with the village communities, where the parish priest has been a central figure of respect and influence regardless of the changes in political regime and land ownership. In recent times, the parish council has provided an element of local democracy and, together with the parish pump and the parish hall, a focus for social life.
Parish registers of births, marriages, and deaths, which in England have been kept since the reign of Elizabeth I, are one of the major sources of genealogical and demographic information. They provide the natural gateway into local history.3
Above all, the parish is the corner-stone of the ordered life of Europe’s countryside. The villagers’ ceaseless toil against the seasons has survived serfdom, plagues, famines, wars, poverty, and the CAP:
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.4
St Omer (1127) led the way for Bruges and Ghent. In north Germany, the self-government of Lübeck (1143) preceded that of Hamburg (1189). Within these communes, merchant associations and craft guilds began to form.
In May 1082 the city of Venice received a charter of liberties from the Byzantine Emperor, guaranteeing freedom of transit and exemption from taxes and duties throughout the Empire west of the Bosporus. Three quays were to be reserved for Venetian use on the Golden Horn. At the time the concessions must have, seemed a reasonable price to pay for Venice’s help in the Emperor’s Norman wars. Trade between Italy and the Levant had been severely restricted since the Muslim conquests of the seventh century, and the merchants of Venice, who had been the Emperor’s subjects as well as his allies, were hardly a major power. In the event the ‘Golden Bull’ of 1082 proved to be a milestone. Granted on the eve of the Crusades and the reopening of the eastern Mediterranean, it turned the Venetian lagoon into the principal emporium between East and West, the home base for a seaborne fortune that was to rival Constantinople itself. Previously the city of St Mark, whose relics had been brought to the Rialto in 828, had been overshadowed by the nearby island of Torcello. The ravages of the Magyars, like the earlier invasion of the Lombards which had propelled the first refugees into the lagoon in the first place, had disrupted contacts with Germany. Henceforth, transalpine trade was to boom. With a chain of forts, trading stations and later colonies at Ragusa, Corfu, Corinth, Crete, and Cyprus, the Venetian galleys could protect the convoys carrying silks, spices, silver and slaves, timber, corn, and salt. The Republic of Venice did not have an easy relationship with Byzantium; in 1182 all its merchants in Constantinople were massacred. But it outlasted the Empire, surviving until destroyed by Napoleon in 1797. [GHETTO] [MORES]
In 1084, at the monastery of Chartreuse near Grenoble, the Carthusian Order was founded by St Bruno of Cologne (1033–1101). Its strict contemplative rules directed the monks to live in silence in closed cells. At the time it must have seemed just an austere variation on the older Cluniac model; in fact it was the sign that the Latin Church was moving into an era of systematic institutionalization. In 1098, at Citeaux in Burgundy, the long career of the Cistercian Order was launched. It owed its main development to St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). Elsewhere, secular clerics or ‘regular canons’ entered organized communities governed by the three vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Most adopted the Rule of St Augustine, and hence were known as Augustinians. One such group, the Premonstratensians or Norbertines, founded by St Norbert at Prémontré near Laon in 1120, spread widely in Eastern as well as Western Europe. In those same years, the monks at Cluny were building a church which for five centuries remained the largest in Western Christendom.
In the summer of 1085 Alfonso VI of Castile-Leon captured the Muslim city of Toledo. At the time, it appeared to be just one more incident on the Christian-Muslim frontier: Alfonso was in league with the Emir of Seville, and was keeping the Emir’s daughter as his concubine. In fact it proved to be the first step in the Christian Reconquista—the 400-year-struggle for possession of the Iberian peninsula. Toledo was the largest and most central of some twenty-five taifa or ‘party’ kingdoms into which the old Cordoban emirate had fragmented. Their disunity gave the Christian rulers their chance. Within the decade, Alfonso’s champion, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, had entered Valencia. Within a century, the wars of Christian and Muslim had turned into a general contest of attrition on all fronts. The Moors suffered a decisive defeat at the pass of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. The capture of Cordova in 1236, of Seville in 1248, and of Murcia in 1266 put the greater part of the Peninsula into Christian hands, [EL CID]
On 27 November 1095, at the synod of Clermont in Auvergne, Pope Urban II appealed to all Christians to fight for the delivery of Jerusalem. Enthroned on a dais on the hillside below Notre Dame du Port, he addressed a great throng of mitred bishops, knights, and common people. At the time he was seeking to promote the so-called Truce of God, and to bring a halt to the endemic warfare of feudal society. He was also pursuing a policy of reconciliation with the Byzantine Patriarch, wishing to share the Byzantines’ distress at the Turkish advance. Yet his appeal struck a chordof popular sympathy: the crowd roared Dios b volt, ‘God wishes it’; a cardinal fell on his knees and, in the name of the multitude, seized with convulsive trembling, recited the Confiteor. There and then, men jostled to join. The proposal for a Crusade, a ‘War of the Cross’, was taken up throughout the Latin Church. Preachers such as Peter the Hermit spread the word. Henceforth, for six or seven generations, counts, kings, commoners, and even children flocked ‘to take the Cross’ and to fight the infidel in the Holy Land.
MORES
IN the late eleventh century, when a Byzantine princess arrived in Venice to marry the Doge, it was found that she ate her food with a golden fork. She was reprimanded by the Bishop for anti-social behaviour. People in the medieval West took meat with their fingers from a common dish. The fork came into general use only during the Renaissance, and only for lifting morsels to one’s own plate.1 The table set of knife, fork, and spoon was an eighteenth-century innovation.
European manners can be thoroughly studied from the stream of manuals written to teach people how to behave. The earliest such manuals, such as De institutione novitarum by Hugh St Victor (d. 1141), were addressed to clerics. The thirteenth-century Bavarian Hofzucht (Courtly Manners), attributed to Tannhäuser, was directed at boorish courtiers, as was John Russell’s fifteenth-century Book of Courtesy e. The most influential publication of the genre, the De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (1530) by Erasmus, ran into 130 editions. It was reprinted in Russia when Peter the Great sought to ‘civilize’ his court 200 years later.2 // Cortegiano (The Courtier, 1528), by Baldassare Castiglione, and a similar Latin treatise (1566) by Lukasz Górnicki, enjoyed long-standing international fame. Thereafter, numerous guides to the conduct of ‘high society’, especially on the French model, were used to spread the cultivation of manners into ever-widening social circles.
At one time, historians treated manners as a subject of passing fashions. But serious analysts have argued that they provide the outward evidence for profound social and psychological changes. Attitudes to every activity can be plotted overtime, and related to long-term trends.
Injunctions about spitting, for example, reveal a number of basic shifts:
Do not spit over or on the table. (English c.1463)
Do not spit across the table as hunters do. (German, 15th cent.)
Turn away when spitting, lest your saliva fall on someone. If anything purulent falls to the ground, it should be trodden upon. (Erasmus, 1530)
You should abstain from spitting at table, if possible. (Italian, 1558)
Formerly, it was permitted to spit on the ground before people of rank…. Today, that is an indecency. (French, 1572)
Frequent spitting is disagreeable. At important houses, one spits into one’s handkerchief … Do not spit so far that you have to look for the saliva to stamp on it. (Liège, 1714)
It is very ill-mannered to swallow what should be spat… After spitting into your handkerchief, you should fold it once, without looking at it, and put it in your pocket. (La Salle, 1729)
It is unpardonably gross for children to spit in the faces of their playmates. (La Salle, 1774)
Spitting is at all times a disgusting habit. Besides being coarse and atrocious, it is very bad for the health. (English, 1859)
Have you noticed that today we [hide] what our fathers did not hesitate to display openly? … The spittoon is a piece of furniture no longer found in modern households. (Cabanès, 1910)
It emerges that the need to spit was not challenged until the eighteenth century, although the constraints about where, when, and how to spit had grown steadily. In the nineteenth century, spitting fell into disrepute, perhaps through fear of tuberculosis. Yet a certain hypocrisy separated the rules of good manners and the widespread use of the spittoon—a vessel required by the habit of tobacco-chewing. Only in the twentieth century did a total ban become effective. ‘No Spitting’ notices were retained on London buses until the 1960s. By that time certain rock groups were urging their fans to spit as a mark of social defiance. Spitting may yet return to respectability.
Just as ‘the civilizing process’ is seen gradually to build up self-restraint within society as a whole, so the training of infants builds up self-restraint within adults:
Thus the sociohistorical process of centuries, in which the standard of what is shameful and offensive is slowly raised, is re-enacted in abbreviated form in the life of the individual human being … One could speak, as a parallel to the laws of biogenesis, of a fundamental law of sociogenesis and psychogenesis.
Critics of this ‘civilizing’ theory might object to such a narrow definition of civilization. Some might think it a peculiarly German theory—all tidy habits and empty heads. Many would insist that the art of savoir vivre demands rather more than the ability to control one’s spittle, sphincter, and silverware. The ‘civilisation curves’ of Norbert Elias and his theory of unilinear progress will not convince everyone. But all would admit to the gulf which separates so-called ‘Western civilized man’ from medieval modes of behaviour, where modern concepts of hygiene, of individual respect, of privacy, and of ‘personal space’ were virtually absent. One has only to ponder some other assorted medieval injunctions:
It is bad manners … to wear a helmet when serving ladies.
Don’t blow your nose with the fingers you hold the meat with.
If you have to scrape [the back of] your throat, do so politely with your
Farts may be concealed by coughing. [coat
Before you sit down, make sure that your seat has not been fouled.
It is impolite to greet someone who is urinating or defecating.
When you eat, do not forget the poor. God will reward you.5