23
This book has argued that not only the early Middle Ages as a whole, but every large- and small-scale society which existed during it, needs to be analysed in its own terms, and without hindsight. Such a concern makes a conclusion almost unnecessary; for I have tried consistently to stress the difference of local experience. I have compared rather than generalized, throughout the book, in order to respect those differences, and to make sense of them.
This hostility to hindsight, which too often brings a moralizing condemnation of the early Middle Ages, does not mean, however, that one should feel a need to see the people of the period as ‘just like us’, or, worse still, to infuse the period with any kind of nostalgia. For, of course, the early Middle Ages was very unlike twenty-first-century western Europe, in which I am writing. Current values, such as liberalism, secularism, toleration, a sense of irony, an interest in the viewpoints of others, however skin-deep in our own society, were simply absent then, or at best only vestigially present, as indeed they have been absent from most of the societies of the past. Early medieval people did have a sense of humour, needless to say, but what was funny to them (largely mockery and dreadful puns) by no means makes them seem closer to us; they used irony, but it was usually pretty savage and sarcastic. Nearly all writers of the period, even religious rigorists committed to the egalitarianism of New Testament or Qur’anic theology, took for granted the irreducible nature of social hierarchy, and the innate moral virtue of the aristocratic social strata they mostly themselves came from. Servility to social superiors and the self-righteous coercion of social inferiors were normal and even virtuous; so was the universal (as far as we can see) assumption that men were intrinsically superior to women. The only absentee from our modern litany of awful behaviour was essentialist racism, but a generalized chauvinistic belief that foreigners were inferior and stupid certainly filled the gap here. I have amused myself while writing this book by trying to identify which, if any, late antique or early medieval writers (that is, those whose personality we can recapture, at any rate in part, with least mediation) I could imagine meeting with any real pleasure. It comes down to remarkably few: Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Gregory the Great, Einhard, maybe Braulio of Zaragoza - and, with less enthusiasm, Augustine, for his remarkable intelligence and self-awareness however, not for his tolerance. But, for all its distance from us, and in large part because of it, the early Middle Ages - the many different early medieval realities - are interesting. It is its interest I have tried most to bring out and make apparent in this book, not an overarching structural patterning for the period, a metahistorical narrative, most of the current examples of which, for the reasons outlined at the start of Chapter 1, are inventions.
All the same, there were indeed trends in the history of early medieval Europe. The task of this final chapter is to bring them out, and make them explicit, although all of them have been alluded to in the course of the book. There seem to me to have been six major shifts (or breaks) in the course of the six centuries covered in this book, three in the West, two in the East, one in the North, which I will characterize in chronological order; and I would also wish to stress a set of underlying structures, underpinning all of the political and social systems of the period, which will be discussed at the end.
The first break, and the most momentous, remains the break-up of the western Roman empire. As we have seen, reactions to the old moralistic reading of the ‘end of ancient civilization’ have often in recent decades sought to stress continuities across the fifth century, particularly in cultural and religious practices, and partly in political aspiration too; these continuities were real. The old image of the sweeping away of Roman culture by vital Germanic barbarism (succeeded by Roman-German ‘fusion’ under the aegis of Catholic churchmen) is irretrievably outdated as a result. But this does not mean that the fifth century in the West was not a major period of change (see above all Chapter 4). The fiscal basis of the Roman state, the land tax, was steadily removed from centrality in the post-Roman kingdoms, if not in the fifth century, then in the sixth. None of the post-Roman kingdoms except possibly Ostrogothic Italy even attempted to reproduce the Roman state on a smaller scale, as post-‘Abbasid states did in the Islamic world (see Chapter 14); local realities in the West favoured simpler political systems, and practices steadily diverged, with the exception of a militarization of political culture, which was generalized across Latin Europe (see Chapters 5 and 6). The economic unity of the western Mediterranean was broken, too; aristocracies became more localized and usually poorer, and material culture in most places became much simpler (see Chapter 9). The bricolage that marks much early medieval political and cultural (and, even more, architectural) practice was a natural result of the fragmentation of Roman models and resources (see for example Chapters 8 and 10), even though the fragments remained operative for a long time; hence my concern in Chapters 2 and 3 to explain how late Rome worked, as an essential foundation to what followed. That bricolage was both very creative, and necessary because of Roman fragmentation. It was an integral part of early medieval political and social activity for many centuries.
The eastern parallel to the fifth-century break, and indeed the major moment of change in the East, was the high point of Arab conquest in 636-51 (see Chapters 11 and 12). This threw the east Roman/Byzantine world into two centuries of crisis, and indeed permanently pushed Byzantium into a different political trajectory, more centralized and more militarized. The Arab caliphate was of course entirely new, even though its structural roots were arguably quite as Roman as were those of the Byzantines. The wealth of the caliphate and the weakness of the seventh-century Byzantine state (not to speak of the western kingdoms) pushed the epicentres of politics further eastwards than they had been for nearly a millennium, first to Syria and then, after 750, to Iraq. When medium-distance commerce began to revive in the Mediterranean after 800 or so, its focus was an Egypt which (unlike in the Roman empire) looked quite as much to the east as to the north and west (see Chapter 15). The continuities in state structures in the seventh-century East, and later, make the changes of the 640s less total than were those of the fifth century in the West; but they were more dramatic, indeed more terrifying (for victors and defeated alike), than any others in this book. Caliphs ‘Umar I and ‘Uthman have no real rivals in our period as architects of huge, unreversed, political and (eventually) cultural shifts; even Charlemagne does not match them there, and fifth-century conquerors like Geiseric and Clovis do not run them close.
The second major shift in the West was cultural: it was the development of an explicitly moralized political practice, above all in the century 780-880. There was a tradition of moralized Christian politics going back to late Rome, of course (see Chapter 3), but it did not have a direct relationship to secular political programmes. Visigothic Spain (see Chapter 6) was arguably the first polity to develop this, but it was Charlemagne and his successors (see Chapters 16 and 17) who first created, in an integrated way, a political programme aimed at bringing a whole people, over a large segment of Europe, closer to salvation. The Carolingians linked the state and a semi-autonomous church together in a tight partnership, which became the norm in the Latin West for over two centuries, until popes from Gregory VII (1073-85) onwards sought to separate them again, which they only managed in part - and even this was reversed again in northern Europe in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Perhaps more important, the Carolingians created the presumption that kings and their acts could and should be policed by churchmen for their morality, which created problems for rulers such as Louis the Pious and Lothar II already in the ninth century, and would continue to cause problems for many of their successors in Europe (including, from the tenth century, England: see Chapter 19) for a long time to come. This package of changes was a genuine Carolingian innovation, with only ad-hoc precedents before, and marked out western political practice as different from then on. The Byzantine empire and the caliphate certainly matched the Carolingians in their religious confidence, but, as explored at the end of Chapter 17, neither of the great eastern empires matched the urgency of the Carolingian programme. Salvationist movements marked Muslim politics throughout the seventh century, and again in 747-50 and (in North Africa) in the tenth century, but they were focused on who was to be caliph, more than on precise programmes. This was a specifically western shift.
The third western break was the end of the Carolingian world: not so much the failure of the unity of the Frankish political system in the mid-to late ninth century, which no one even at the time expected to last, but rather the failure of the structures of public power themselves in some parts of that system, notably West Francia and (to an extent) Italy, in and around the year 1000 (see Chapters 18, 21, 22). That failure marks the end of this book, and made the eleventh century in much of Europe a very different period in its basic paradigms. I will come back to some of the implications of that in a moment; for this, like the fifth-century break, is a change that has been both overstated by moral izers and other catastrophists, and over-contested by continuitists. One has to recognize the reality of the change, without becoming overwhelmed by it.
The second eastern change was, similarly, the break-up of the caliphate in the early tenth century (see Chapter 14). As already noted, most of the post-‘Abbasid polities did indeed preserve the state structures of the caliphate, which could more easily be reproduced on the regional level than those of the western Roman empire. The Arab world was thus less dramatically altered by disunity than one might have expected. All the same, it ceased to be politically dominant, for it was of course too divided. This allowed a newly stable Byzantine empire to come into its century of military glory in the mid-tenth century, and to dominate its neighbours (see Chapter 13); once al-Andalus disintegrated in civil war after 1009, Basil II was by far the strongest ruler in Europe, and probably outmatched the Fatimids in the southern Mediterranean too. Only new Muslim conquerors from the east, the Seljuk Turks, would undermine that power in the late eleventh century. And Muslim unity in the Mediterranean lands would have to wait until the Ottoman conquests of the sixteenth century to be re-established. The Ottomans indeed, in a sense, restored the empire of Justinian, with a Mediterranean newly centred on Constantinople/Istanbul, and made it last rather longer, too. But the thousand-year gap between the two makes that re-creation no more than an interesting historical parallel; the genealogical links between the two were of far less importance than the huge structural differences, which had begun with the seventh century and were pushed along in the tenth.
The major change in the North came above all in the tenth century: it was the steady extension of stable political and social hierarchies across the whole wide area between the Frankish and Byzantine empires in the South and the hunter-gatherers of the far northern forests. First to make use of their opportunities here were Anglo-Saxon kings in the eighth century (see Chapters 7 and 19); in the tenth they were followed by many more, Danes, Poles, Bohemians, Hungarians and Rus, although more falteringly as yet in the rest of Scandinavia, or in Wales and Ireland (see Chapter 20). I attributed this to the stability and expansionism of the Franks and Byzantines (and, by extension, the English, and, later, the Danes), which made them both models to emulate, and threats if the northern polities could not reorganize to oppose them. The crystallization of kingship and hierarchy in the North was in most places permanent; this fact in itself demonstrates the solidity of the political systems created by Charles Martel, Pippin III and Charlemagne to the west, the Iconoclast and Macedonian emperors to the east, in the second half of our period. In the West, this solidity outlasted even the Carolingian eclipse, for the Ottonians and their successors in East Francia had as much hegemony in the Slav and Scandinavian lands as Charlemagne, if not more. Francia and Byzantium together bestrode early medieval Europe after about 750 as much as the Roman empire itself had, three hundred years earlier. They were not as powerful, and they faced a far more powerful rival to the south-east, the ‘Abbasid caliphate (for a century the strongest power in the world), but they had more impact on their northern neighbours than the Romans ever did.
The political patterns of Europe and the Mediterranean across the period 400 to 1000 thus resolve themselves into three blocks, roughly separable chronologically. In the first, the Roman empire dominated western and southern Europe and the Mediterranean, without rivals to the north at all. This ended in the fifth century in the West, of course, although Justinian partly reversed that in the western Mediterranean; it continued until the early seventh in the East. The second period was one of polycentric power; by 700 the major western polities were three - Merovingian Francia, Visigothic Spain and Lombard Italy - fairly evenly matched and each more powerful than any other neighbour, set against the expanding Umayyad caliphate and a Byzantine empire hanging on by its teeth. The third period was one of three major powers, the Franks, the Byzantines and the ‘Abbasids, which by 950 was reduced to the first two of these, the Franks weakening, the Byzantines strengthening; these two were hegemonic in Europe by the late eighth century, and helped the polities of the North to develop as well, by 1000 or shortly after. I have earlier compared the striking self-confidence of all three of the powers in this third block of time; they all knew they were stronger than their immediate predecessors, and than everywhere else west of China, and they each regarded this as a proof of their moral superiority and a justification for further expansion. The notably self-aware protagonism of not just the Carolingians, but, in different ways, their Byzantine and Arab contemporaries as well, is a direct consequence of this; and all three left traces long into the future. But it would be an error to allow this to eclipse the smaller-scale innovations which were made in the second block of time, too, such as the establishment by the Merovingians of the Paris-Rhine region as a political epicentre (an innovation which has lasted ever since), or the episcopal politics of seventh-century Spain, or Byzantine Iconoclasm, or, above all, the Umayyad political settlement. No one can study any one of these, never mind all of them, and conclude that the early Middle Ages lay outside the narratives of ‘real’ history; and, by now, no one does.
Underpinning the political systems and political changes just discussed was a network of structures common to all the societies of this book. They were not specific to the early Middle Ages - indeed, they arguably characterized most of the pre-capitalist world - but they need to be recognized if the period is to be understood. I shall here separate them into three: the accumulation of wealth, the institutionalization of politics, and the culture of the public, and each will be characterized briefly.
Wealth and power in our period were overwhelmingly based on the land. The more one could take from the land, that is, from its peasant cultivators, either in rents or in taxes, the richer one was, the more resources one could manipulate, the more armed men one could support, the more power one had. Taxation was the surest means of exploiting the land and the peasantry, for in theory everyone had to pay it, not just the tenants of one’s own properties - hence the relative prominence of Byzantium and the caliphate, which were tax-raising states, unlike those of the post-Roman West. But, even in the West, Frankish kings in particular could get rich just by taking rents from extensive royal lands, even in times, like the late seventh century, when they were not taking wealth from their neighbours too. The same logic worked for the aristocracies of each political system. A rich aristocracy generally aided rulers, for in early medieval political conditions most aristocracies were closely involved with royal/imperial power. The stronger kings were, the more they could give to, and thus attract, their élite supporters; the accumulation of wealth thus doubly reinforced political cohesion. The only major exception to this was the caliphate, where local aristocracies had relatively little to do with political power. For a long time, caliphs were so rich that this did not matter, but it was in the end a contributing factor to the break-up of ‘Abbasid unity.
The link between wealth and power meant that a strong state essentially depended on peasant exploitation. We cannot easily say which peasants would have preferred: the security most powerful rulers could give them (a security which was only relative: the reigns of Justinian, Charlemagne and Basil II have all left clear evidence of local violence and oppression); or the autonomy, and lower rents and tributes, which most peasants had in the small and weak polities of Britain or the Slav and Scandinavian worlds before the tenth century, an autonomy which was risky if stronger invaders came through on raiding and slaving expeditions. We simply do not have the information that would allow us to tell, and nor indeed did most early medieval peasants themselves; which seems preferable will thus largely depend on one’s own presuppositions (I think they would have preferred autonomy). But the wealth and power of the rich did go with the exploitation of the poor, and with restrictions on the fluidity of peasant life. As just implied, peasants were for a long time less restricted in the North. They were also, in parts of the post-Roman western provinces, and maybe also in parts of the Byzantine empire, more autonomous in the sixth to eighth centuries (in Byzantium, the seventh to ninth) than before or after; states and aristocracies were generally weaker in the earliest Middle Ages than under the Carolingians or the Macedonian emperors. With the arrival of stronger powers, local controls on the peasantry increased again, and in the West these controls continued to increase even when Carolingian power broke up, spreading northwards across the European continent too.
With wealth also came exchange. Rich aristocracies (and churches, and kings) had more disposable wealth to buy artisanal goods, which could thus be produced in larger quantities, and sold more widely - even to peasants, in some cases. Poorer aristocracies and more autonomous peasantries generated less specialized productions. There was more complex production and exchange in the Roman empire than in the western successor states, or than in eighth-century Byzantium; later, at a lower level, there was more complex production and exchange (by far) in the Merovingian heartland of northern Francia than in its English or north German/Scandinavian neighbours; with the Carolingians exchange expanded in Francia again, although not matching Roman levels or those of the active economies of the Muslim world. This tight linkage between aristocratic wealth and peasant exploitation on the one hand and economic complexity on the other would last for a long time into the Middle Ages; it only began to weaken when large-scale production became so general and the sale of its products so capillary that it could begin to rely on peasant, not aristocratic, demand. With the possible exception of Egypt (where, however, the work has not yet been done which could tell us either way), this would not begin to be the case in Europe and the Mediterranean until after 1200 at the earliest, and often much later. In our period, the concentration of wealth, exploitation, exchange and political power went hand in hand, and (with due caution) one can be used as a guide to the others - which, given the scattered nature of our evidence, is often useful.
The second element to be stressed here is the degree to which power was based on permanent political patterns. It was all very well for a king to have landed resources, but if his power was simply based on the personal loyalty of his armed men - a loyalty which never came free - then, unless he was permanently expanding the area he controlled, he would risk running out of land, having given too much of it away, and his power would go as well. This was seen by Marc Bloch as a permanent tendency of feudal society in the West after 900, and we have seen the problems of the ‘politics of land’ on a number of occasions in this book, most recently in the context of the collapse of royal authority in West Francia in the tenth century (Chapters 18 and 21), which is indeed the classic example of the pattern. How did rulers cope? For, outside the highly personalized and small-scale political systems of (for example) post-Roman Britain and Ireland, early medieval rulers did indeed often manage to maintain large and effective states for long periods of time, even though they were constantly granting their resources away.
This was relatively easy for tax-raising states, the Roman and Byzantine empires and most of the Islamic polities. There, the state had a major resource-base which could pay for a salaried army, largely independent of aristocratic support, and also reward the loyal on a very large scale; only in extreme crisis circumstances (as with the fifth-century West, or the break-up of al-Andalus in the 1010s) could aristocrats contemplate going it alone, and normally they associated themselves as closely with rulers as the latter would let them. Tax-raising states also needed a complex bureaucratic hierarchy just to collect the taxes, which, together with the military hierarchy, created a career-structure for the ambitious based on a set of stable - even if often inchoate - institutions. This institutionalization of political practice was a direct inheritance from the Roman (and also Sassanian) empire, to Byzantium and the caliphate. It was in each sufficiently complex to sustain two separate élites, one civilian, the other military. Under Rome, the civilian elite had the highest status, and attracted the landed aristocracy most firmly into it; under all their successors the military hierarchy was dominant. But either way the state was, in its basic structures, pretty solid, as the survival of the Byzantine empire after the Arab conquests shows.
In the post-Roman West, most of the bureaucratic hierarchy dissolved together with the tax system, and the army became a set of aristocratic military followings; the institutions of the Roman state were much reduced. They did not go away, however; there were counts and dukes and palace officials still in Francia, Italy, Visigothic Spain, and these positions were highly remunerative (they had lands attached) and competed for. The Carolingians extended this with their temporary concessions of honores, which could involve office, royal land, or control over monasteries. Almost every political player had to have an office of some kind, or else be very close to the king on a personal level, as Einhard was. Again, going it alone was for long inconceivable, except on political margins, such as the mountains of northern Spain in the sixth century or the eastern Alps around Chur in the sixth to eighth. The political community was also regularly united in public assemblies, in church councils, in the army-muster, and in the king’s court, as we shall see in a moment; those who failed to attend risked losing their lands, at least those conferred by kings. These meetings were sufficiently regular for them to be in large and ramshackle polities like Francia and Spain, as important an institutional underpinning as office-holding was. As we saw in Chapters 5 and 16, political players in Francia, even those who lived a long way from court, needed to know where the king was; patronage, faction-fighting, sometimes even a sense of public responsibility, all depended on royal direction. This centrality for kings - or for their courts when kings were minors, or marginalized, as in Francia in the late seventh century - was reinforced by the knowledge that the disloyal would face a retribution which was fairly certain to come in the end, even if it did not come immediately. Fear reinforced self-interest in the political calculations of the aristocracy, and both helped the cohesion of the major post-Roman states. By the tenth century at the latest, and in some respects already in the eighth, this political logic also extended to England.
Linked to this is the final element in early medieval political systems which I want to stress here, the culture of the public, the strongest inheritance of Rome. The Roman empire had a strong sense of the difference between the public, the arena of the state and the community, and the private sphere; the boundary was not drawn in exactly the same place as it is today, and there was no neat opposition between ‘public’ and ‘private’, but the uses of the word publicus were analogous to those we are used to. This difference was easy to maintain in a tax-raising state, for the taxes emanated from and supported the public sphere. The Byzantines continued the concept without change, and the Muslim polities, though using different terminology, invested such ‘public’ functions as law and collective worship with the same sort of importance. But the post-Roman western polities maintained the idea of the public arena too; it was a very important image in Visigothic, Lombard, Merovingian and Carolingian practice. Royal property, law courts, royal officials, and assemblies both great and small were regularly described as publicus in early medieval Latin texts.
The clear sense that we get from our western sources that the world of royal power was also the public world of the collectivity (of free males) as a whole is the best justification I can offer for consistently using, in this book as elsewhere, the word ‘state’ to describe these western political systems. Although one essential resource for this public sphere, taxation, was already vestigial by the seventh century, the assembly, an import into political practice from the Germanic North, was a further reinforcement. In Scandinavia, and for a long time in England, the assembly was the only collective element in a political power-structure that otherwise relied entirely on the personal bonds between kings (or lords) and their closest retainers. In Francia and the other Romano-Germanic kingdoms, by contrast, it came to form a crucial part of the imagery of a public sphere which was otherwise Roman in its origin, and indeed it extended it further, in that the assembly, at least in theory, linked the king directly to all the free male population. That real politics was also based on a manipulation of constantly shifting factions and personal relationships does not take away from this conception of the public sphere; indeed, in the high Carolingian period the whole moral project of the king and his kingdom, the correctio of the faithful, could be described as a (or the) res publica. It is not, on this level, surprising that Roman law could be explicitly drawn on in the legislation of Charles the Bald; its presuppositions about the nature of the political system continued to be entirely apposite. This of course further strengthened the relevance of royal politics for the ambitious; privatus did not denote any sort of ‘private’ political activity, but, when used in this context, came simply to mean ‘powerless’. Public power was all there was, even if the resources of the Roman public world were no longer available.
It is the public world in this sense that weakened in the tenth century and, in particular, the eleventh in the West, above all in the west Frankish lands. The parameters of politics changed, as we saw in the last chapters of the book. In a seigneurie banale, the old public rights now taken over by local lords were seen as part of their property, and could be divided between heirs or alienated away. Lordship could be claimed by people who had never met a king; the title of count could be assumed in some areas by anyone who was powerful enough, and passed on to his heirs. Kings in France or cities in Italy in the twelfth century used the terminology of publicus, but they had to construct it from the ground upwards, in a bricolage of links of personal dependence and collective reaffirma tion which by now had very little to do with the Roman past. This more ‘private’ world was not worse than that of the Carolingians and their predecessors; aristocrats behaved badly in both, to their peers and to their (and other people’s) peasantries. But it was different: the dialectic between the public sphere and (what we call) private interest had gone. The local powers that castle lords managed to enforce over the villages around were no longer illegal or quasi-legal, as opposed to the public law of kings, but instead became a new legality: in France, in particular, for a century in some regions, this is all there was.
The years around 1000 are a better end-point for some regions of Europe than for others. They do not work for Byzantium at all; at the other end of Europe, they work very well for al-Andalus (and also for the ‘Abbasid caliphate, though 950 would there have been better). The late tenth century also denotes a break in much of Slav and Scandinavian history, as it marks the beginnings of durable state-formation there. In East Francia/Germany and in England, in both of which Carolingian political parameters easily survived past 1000 (in England, indeed, they never went away), the millennium is not such a good divide; it comes a little early for Italy (1080 would have been better as a date for the end of the public sphere there: the judicial assembly, in particular, survived until then without much difficulty), though it works well for West Francia/France. Which is to say: no date is perfect. I chose 1000 simply because I wanted to explore the divergencies of the Carolingian successor states and of post-Alfredian England, and the years of Byzantine success, in the tenth century, and did not want to add in the Seljuk Turks, or the problems of ‘Gregorian reform’ and the start of the grand narrative of moral progress which I lamented in Chapter 1, in the eleventh. But ending with a fundamental shift in the concepts of political power, even if only in a few parts of Europe, does not seem unreasonable. The inheritance of Rome, in those regions at least, lasted right up to around 1000; but after that its shadow faded away.