The Middle Ages
The period of European history extending from about 500 to 1400–1500 ce
is traditionally known as the Middle Ages. The term was first used by
15th-century scholars to designate the period between their own time and
the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The period is often considered to
have its own internal divisions: either early and late or early, central
or high, and late.
Although once regarded as a time of uninterrupted ignorance,
superstition, and social oppression, the Middle Ages are now understood
as a dynamic period during which the idea of Europe as a distinct
cultural unit emerged. During late antiquity and the early Middle Ages,
political, social, economic, and cultural structures were profoundly
reorganized, as Roman imperial traditions gave way to those of the
Germanic peoples who established kingdoms in the former Western Empire.
New forms of political leadership were introduced, the population of
Europe was gradually Christianized, and monasticism was established as
the ideal form of religious life. These developments reached their
mature form in the 9th century during the reign of Charlemagne and other
rulers of the Carolingian dynasty, who oversaw a broad cultural revival
known as the Carolingian renaissance.
In the central, or high, Middle Ages, even more dramatic growth
occurred. The period was marked by economic and territorial expansion,
demographic and urban growth, the emergence of national identity, and
the restructuring of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. It was the
era of the Crusades, Gothic art and architecture, the papal monarchy,
the birth of the university, the recovery of ancient Greek thought, and
the soaring intellectual achievements of St. Thomas Aquinas (c.
1224–74).
It has been traditionally held that by the 14th century the dynamic
force of medieval civilization had been spent and that the late Middle
Ages were characterized by decline and decay. Europe did indeed suffer
disasters of war, famine, and pestilence in the 14th century, but many
of the underlying social, intellectual, and political structures
remained intact. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europe experienced an
intellectual and economic revival, conventionally called the
Renaissance, that laid the foundation for the subsequent expansion of
European culture throughout the world.
Many historians have questioned the conventional dating of the
beginning and end of the Middle Ages, which were never precise in any
case and cannot be located in any year or even century. Some scholars
have advocated extending the period defined as late antiquity (c. 250–c.
750 ce) into the 10th century or later, and some have proposed a Middle
Ages lasting from about 1000 to 1800. Still others argue for the
inclusion of the old periods Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation
into a single period beginning in late antiquity and ending in the
second half of the 16th century.
Edward Peters
Michael Frassetto
The Middle Ages » The idea of the Middle Ages » The term and concept
before the 18th century
From the 4th to the 15th century, writers of history thought within a
linear framework of time derived from the Christian understanding of
Scripture—the sequence of Creation, Incarnation, Christ’s Second Coming,
and the Last Judgment. In Book XXII of City of God, the great Church
Father Augustine of Hippo (354–430) posited six ages of world history,
which paralleled the six days of Creation and the six ages of the
individual human life span. For Augustine, the six ages of history—from
Adam and Eve to the Flood, from the Flood to Abraham, from Abraham to
King David, from David to the Babylonian Exile, from the Exile to Jesus
Christ, and from Christ to the Second Coming—would be followed by a
seventh age, the reign of Christ on earth. World history was conceived
as “salvation history”—the course of events from Creation to the Last
Judgment—and its purposes were religious and moral. Thus, all the
references by Augustine and other early authors to a “middle time” must
be understood within the framework of the sixth age of salvation
history. Early Christian interpretations of the biblical Book of Daniel
(Daniel 2:31–45, 7), especially those of the Church Father Jerome (c.
347–419/420) and the historian Paulus Orosius (flourished 414–417),
added the idea of four successive world empires—Babylon, Persia, Greece,
and Rome. Late writers in this tradition added the idea of the
translation imperii (“translation of empire”): from Alexander the Great
to the Romans, from the Romans to the Franks under Charlemagne in 800,
and from Charlemagne to the East Frankish emperors and Otto I. A number
of early European thinkers built upon the idea of the translation of
empire to define European civilization in terms of scholarship and
chivalry (the knightly code of conduct). All these ideas were readily
compatible with the Augustinian sequence of the six ages of the world.
The single exception to this trend was the work of the late
12th-century Calabrian abbot and scriptural exegete Joachim of Fiore (c.
1130– c. 1201). According to Joachim, there were three ages in human
history: that of the Father (before Christ), that of the Son (from
Christ to an unknown future date, which some of Joachim’s followers
located in the late 13th century), and that of the Holy Spirit (during
which all Christendom would turn into a vast church with a universal
priesthood of believers). But Joachim’s view was also firmly expressed
in terms of salvation history. Many chroniclers and writers of
histories, of course, wrote about shorter periods of time and focused
their efforts on local affairs, but the great Augustinian metanarrative
underlay their work too. From several confessional perspectives, this
view still survives.
In the 14th century, however, the literary moralist Petrarch
(1304–74), fascinated with ancient Roman history and contemptuous of the
time that followed it, including his own century, divided the past into
ancient and new—antiquity and recent times—and located the transition
between them in the 4th century, when the Roman emperors converted to
Christianity. According to Petrarch, what followed was an age of
tenebrae (“shadows”), a “sordid middle time” with only the hope of a
better age to follow. Although Petrarch’s disapproval of the
Christianized Roman and post-Roman world may seem irreligious, he was in
fact a devout Christian; his judgment was based on aesthetic, moral, and
philological criteria, not Christian ones. Petrarch’s limitless
admiration for Rome heralded a novel conception of the European past and
established criteria for historical periodization other than those of
salvation history or the history of the church, empire, cities, rulers,
or noble dynasties. His followers in later centuries focused primarily
on the transformation of the arts and letters, seeing a renewal of
earlier Roman dignity and achievement beginning with the painter Giotto
(1266/67 or 1276–1337) and with Petrarch himself and continuing into the
15th and 16th centuries.
In the early 16th century, religious critics and reformers, including
both the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus and the Protestant reformer
Martin Luther, added another dimension to the new conception and
terminology: the idea of an evangelical, apostolic Christian church that
had become corrupt when it was absorbed by the Roman Empire and now
needed to be reformed, or restored to its earlier apostolic
authenticity. The idea of reform had long been built into the Christian
worldview. This conception of the period between the 4th and 16th
centuries was laid out in the great Protestant history by Matthias
Flacius Illyricus, Centuriae Magdeburgensis (1559–74; “The Magdeburg
Centuries”), which also introduced the practice of dividing the past
into ostensibly neutral centuries. The Roman Catholic version of church
history was reflected in the Annales Ecclesiastici (“Ecclesiastical
Annals”) of Caesar Baronius (1538–1607), completed by Oderico Rinaldi in
1677. Thus, the historical dimension of both the Protestant and the
Catholic reformations of the 16th and 17th centuries added a sharply
polemical religious interpretation of the Christian past to Petrarch’s
original conception, as church history was put to the service of
confessional debate.
Petrarch’s cultural successors, the literary humanists, also used
variants of the expression Middle Ages. Among them was media tempestas
(“middle time”), first used by Giovanni Andrea, bishop of Aleria, in
1469; others were media antiquitas (“middle antiquity”), media aetas
(“middle era”), and media tempora (“middle times”), all first used
between 1514 and 1530. The political theorist and historian Melchior
Goldast appears to have coined the variation medium aevum (“a middle
age”) in 1604; shortly after, in a Latin work of 1610, the English
jurist and legal historian John Selden repeated medium aevum,
Anglicizing the term in 1614 to middle times and in 1618 to middle ages.
In 1641 the French historian Pierre de Marca apparently coined the
French vernacular term le moyen âge, which gained authority in the
respected lexicographical work Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et
infimae latinitatis (1678; “A Glossary for Writers of Middle and Low
Latin”), by Charles du Fresne, seigneur du Cange, who emphasized the
inferior and “middle” quality of Latin linguistic usage after the 4th
century. Other 17th-century historians, including Gisbertus Voetius and
Georg Horn, used terms such as media aetas in their histories of the
church before the Reformation of the 16th century.
The term and idea circulated even more widely in other historical
works. Du Cange’s great dictionary also used the Latin term medium
aevum, as did the popular historical textbook The Nucleus of Middle
History Between Ancient and Modern (1688), by the German historian
Christoph Keller—although Keller observed that in naming the period he
was simply following the terminology of earlier and contemporary
scholars. By the late 17th century the most commonly used term for the
period in Latin was medium aevum, and various equivalents of Middle Ages
or Middle Age were used in European vernacular languages.
The Middle Ages » The idea of the Middle Ages » Enlightenment scorn and
Romantic admiration
During the 17th and 18th centuries a number of thinkers argued that
western Europe after the 15th century had surpassed even antiquity in
its discoveries and technology and had thereby created a distinctively
modern world. Their views, which were sharpened by Enlightenment critics
of earlier European political and religious structures, did nothing to
change the image of the Middle Ages. Voltaire, in his An Essay on
Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of
Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV (1756), savaged the Latin Christian
and the reformed churches for their clerical obscurantism and earlier
rulers for their ruthless and arbitrary use of force. Edward Gibbon, the
English historian whose great work The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire (1776–88) begins with events in late antiquity and ends with the
fall of Constantinople (the capital of the Byzantine Empire) to the
Ottoman Turks in 1453, categorically attributed the beginning of that
very long “decline and fall” to “the triumph of barbarism and religion,”
thus contemptuously characterizing the entire period from the 5th to the
15th century.
But, as Gibbon’s own work showed, not only had the term and the often
pejorative idea of the Middle Ages been shaped in the 16th and 17th
centuries, but so had the critical and technical standards of modern
historical scholarship. Some Enlightenment thinkers even became
interested in earlier periods of European history. Their attraction to
the Middle Ages paralleled the respect for and interest in the period
shared by many ideologically conservative rulers, nobles, magistrates,
and churchmen. But the historians also began to apply critical
techniques to their investigation of the Middle Ages. The new
scholarship on the period was animated in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries by historians imbued with ethnic-national sentiment and with a
conception of historically “ethnic” communities—especially in Germany
and England—that lacked a recognized past (or had only a peripheral
past) in traditional histories of the Greco-Roman world.
During the Romantic era, an affectionate and sentimentalized portrait
of the Middle Ages emerged that was usually no more accurate than the
polemical characterizations of Enlightenment writers. Such views
contributed to the myth that 19th-century nation-states were composed of
ethnic groups that had remained unchanged and had occupied the same
territory for long periods (or had once occupied territory that was now
inhabited by other nation-states). These arguments became powerful and
dangerous political forces in the 19th and 20th centuries, although
research in the late 20th century dismissed them as political fantasies.
Not all 19th-century historians were appreciative of the Middle Ages.
Although the French historian Jules Michelet at first praised the Middle
Ages as the time of the birth of France, his increasing political
liberalism led him to shift his admiration to the 16th century,
virtually coining the term Renaissance in the process of appropriating
it for France. In 1860 the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt published
his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, a work as widely read
and influential as that of Michelet. Despite Romantic nostalgia and
increasingly disciplined scholarship, the work of Michelet and
Burckhardt served to fix the opposition between the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance in the modern mind, generally to the disadvantage of the
former. These views were sharpened by 19th-century anticlericalism,
especially anti-Roman Catholicism, although they were countered by
equally learned Catholic apologists.
The Middle Ages » The idea of the Middle Ages » The Middle Ages in
modern historiography
With the extraordinary growth of the academic discipline of history in
the 19th century, the history of the Middle Ages was absorbed into
academic curricula of history in Europe and the United States and
established in university survey courses and research seminars. Journals
of scholarly historical research began publication in Germany (1859),
France (1876), England (1886), and the United States (1895), regularly
including studies of one aspect or another of the Middle Ages.
Historical documents were edited and substantial scholarly literature
was produced that brought the history of the Middle Ages into
synchronization with other fields of history. The study of the Middle
Ages developed chiefly as a part of the national histories of the
individual European countries, but it was studied in the United States
as a pan-European phenomenon, with a focus after World War I chiefly on
English and French history. The growing influence and prestige of the
new academic and professional field of medieval history were reflected
in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (“Historical Monuments of the
Germans”), a research and publication institute founded in 1819 and
still in operation in Munich, and in the eight-volume collaborative
Cambridge Medieval History (1911–36). (The latter’s replacement, The New
Cambridge Medieval History, began to appear in 1998.)
Most scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries accepted the view
that history is largely a story of progress, in which occasional periods
of decline—such as the Middle Ages—are succeeded by periods of renewal.
The most articulate attack on this view was by the American medievalist
Charles Homer Haskins in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927),
which applied Michelet’s and Burckhardt’s term Renaissance to the 12th
century rather than to the 15th or 16th.
Although the teaching responsibilities of academic historians of the
Middle Ages still generally reflect either the original tripartite
division of European history or the more recent and more common
quadripartite division (ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern),
most scholars specialize in only very small parts of a very long period.
With the emergence of late antiquity as a distinct field of research and
teaching since the mid-20th century, the early part of the conventional
Middle Ages has been rethought and rewritten. The distinctive
post-Classical period of late antiquity is now considered the medium
through which ancient Greco-Roman traditions were passed on to later
Europeans. The older image of a Classical antiquity despised by
world-rejecting Christians and wiped out by savage barbarians is no
longer credible.
Historians in the late 20th and early 21st centuries also debated the
existence of a rapid and extensive change in European society at about
the turn of the 2nd millennium. Some scholars, following the pioneering
lead of the French historian Georges Duby, argued for a rapid mutation,
chiefly with regard to the development of new kinds of lay and
ecclesiastical power over agricultural labour and the simultaneous
restructuring of aristocratic lineages in the 11th century. Others
maintained that a gradual transformation of society and culture occurred
over a longer period of time, beginning earlier than the 11th century.
These debates influenced the concept of a long Middle Ages mentioned
above.
With the emergence of the concept of early modern history, roughly
from 1400 to 1800, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation,
and the scientific revolution were subsumed into a period extending from
the late 14th century to the 18th century. The creation of specialized
scholarly conferences, historical journals, monograph series, and
thematic collections of scholarly essays has reflected these changes in
the configuration of the period.
Scholars also rethought the nature of change in different parts of
Europe. They recognized the problem of the obvious differences between
those European lands in late antiquity that had once been part of the
Roman Empire and those that had not and therefore got their Romanism and
antiquity secondhand. They also revised their understanding of the
relations between the older Mediterranean world (large areas of which
entered the Byzantine and Arab-Islamic cultural orbits) and northern
Europe. In addition, scholars examined how Roman culture exported itself
to peripheries on the north and east through a form of colonization that
culminated in the absorption of originally peripheral colonies into an
expanded core culture.
Middle Ages remains both a commonplace colloquial term and the name
of a subject of academic study. But the history of the term and the
current debate about its temporal and spatial application and
appropriateness is a reminder that historical periods are cultural and
social constructs based on later perceptions of the past, that human
life often changes quite rapidly within labeled periods, however
designated, and that the dialogue between continuity and change is the
historian’s primary intellectual activity.
The Middle Ages » Chronology
Regardless of the loaded aesthetic, philological, moral, confessional,
and philosophical origins of the term Middle Ages, the period it defines
is important because it witnessed the emergence of a distinctive
European civilization centred in a region that was on the periphery of
ancient Mediterranean civilization. Although European civilization
appropriated elements of both Greco-Roman antiquity and Judeo-Christian
religion and ethics, it emerged just as the ancient Mediterranean
ecumenical world was divided into the civilizations of East Rome, or
Byzantium, and Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries. Three sibling
civilizations, two of them Christian, developed at about the same time.
The influence of wider Eurasian and North African history on that of
Europe has attracted the attention of increasing numbers of historians
since the late 20th century. But such change does not occur in a single
year and not even in a single century. To assign any but an approximate
date to the beginning of the end of the Middle Ages, as was once the
fashion, is pointless. Far more important is the assessment of the
nature of change in different areas of life in different periods and
different places between the 3rd and the 16th centuries.
The 8th-century English monk and computist Bede (673–735), adapting
an invention of the 6th-century theologian Dionysius Exiguus, introduced
the method of counting years from the birth of Jesus, anno Domini (“in
the year of our Lord”), which formed the basis of the modern notion of
the Common Era. The new method superseded older traditions, which
included dating by four-year Olympiads, by the number of years since the
founding of Rome in 753 bce, by the years of Roman consuls, by the
regnal years of emperors, and by the 15-year tax assessment cycle of
indictions. Bede’s innovation was taken up by Frankish chroniclers and
rulers from the late 8th century and became standard practice in Europe.
The year itself was divided according to a universal Christian
calendar that gradually displaced the old Roman calendar, although it
retained the Roman names for the months. The liturgical year alternated
seasons of penitence and joy, beginning with Advent, the fifth Sunday
before Christmas, and culminating in penitential Lent and joyful Easter
and its aftermath until Advent returned. Although the unit of the week
and the Sabbath were taken over from Jewish usage—displacing the older
Roman divisions of the month into Kalendae, Nonae, and Ides and the
nine-day market cycle—Christians began to mark time by the seven-day
week and moved its holiest day to Sunday during the 4th century.
The Middle Ages » Late antiquity: the reconfiguration of the Roman world
The Roman Empire of late antiquity was no longer the original empire of
its founder, Augustus, nor was it even the 2nd-century entity of the
emperor Marcus Aurelius. In the 3rd century the emperor, who was first
called princeps (“first citizen”) and then dominus (“lord”), became
divus (“divine”). The powerful religious connotations of the imperial
office were adopted even by usurpers of the imperial throne, backed by
their armies, who then ruled autocratically at the head of a vast
bureaucratic and military organization. Internal and external crises
during the 3rd and 4th centuries resulted in the division of the empire
into an eastern and a western part after 285, with the east possessing a
great and flourishing capital built by the emperor
Constantine—Constantinople (now Istanbul)—and far more economic,
political, and military resources than the western half. The
administration of the entire empire was restructured to finance immense
military expenditures, giving the western European provinces and
frontier areas greater importance but fewer resources. Most of the
population of the empire, including soldiers, were frozen hereditarily
in their occupations. The Western Empire, whose capital moved north from
Rome in the 4th century to a number of provincial cities—Trier, Arles,
Milan, and ultimately Ravenna—became less urbanized, more ruralized, and
gradually dominated by an aristocracy of landowners and military
officials, most of whom lived on large villas and in newly fortified
cities. The provincial economy had become increasingly rural and
localized and was dominated by the needs of the vast military bases near
the frontiers.
The great and small estates were worked by slaves, freedmen, and
coloni (“farmers”), who had once been independent but had voluntarily or
involuntarily subordinated themselves to the great landowners as their
only protection against imperial tax collectors or military
conscription. The landowners dispensed local justice and assembled
private armies, which were powerful enough to negotiate on their
subordinates’ behalf with imperial officials. Mediterranean trade
diminished, and the production of more and more goods was undertaken
locally, as was the organization of social, devotional, and political
life.
Non-Roman peoples from beyond the frontiers—barbari (“barbarians”) or
externae gentes (“foreign peoples”), as the Romans called them—had long
been allowed to enter the empire individually or in families as
provincial farmers and soldiers. But after 375 a number of composite
Germanic peoples, many of them only recently assembled and ruled by
their own new political and military elites, entered the empire as
intact groups, originally by treaty with Rome and later independently.
They established themselves as rulers of a number of western provinces,
particularly parts of Italy, Iberia, Gaul, and Britain, often in the
name of the Roman emperor and with the cooperation of many Roman
provincials.
Roman ethnography classified external peoples as distinct and
ethnically homogeneous groups with unchanging identities; they were part
of the order of nature. Adopting this view, philologists,
anthropologists, and historians in the 19th century maintained that the
Germanic “tribes” that first appeared in the 3rd century were the ethnic
ancestors of the “tribes” of the 5th century and that the ethnic
composition of these groups remained unchanged in the interval. Late
20th-century research in ethnogenesis thoroughly demonstrated the
unreliability of Roman ethnography, although modern concepts of
ethnicity continue to exploit it for political purposes.
The Middle Ages » Late antiquity: the reconfiguration of the Roman world
» The organization of late imperial Christianity
Many Roman provincials were Christian higher clergy. Between the
legalization of Christianity by Constantine about 313 and the adoption
of Christianity as the legal religion of Rome by the emperor Theodosius
I in 380, Christian communities received immense donations of land,
labour, and other gifts from emperors and wealthy converts. The
Christian clergy, originally a body of community elders and managerial
functionaries, gradually acquired sacramental authority and became
aligned with the grades of the imperial civil service. Each civitas
(community or city), an urban unit and its surrounding district, had its
bishop (from the Latin episcopus, “overseer”). Because there had been
more Roman civitates in the Italian and provincial European areas, there
were more and usually smaller dioceses in these regions than in the
distant north and east.
During the 5th and 6th centuries, bishops gradually assumed greater
responsibility for supplying the cities and administering their affairs,
replacing the local governments that for centuries had underpinned and
constituted the local administration of the empire. Two bishops, Ambrose
of Milan (339–397) and Gregory I of Rome (pope 590–604), wrote
influential guidebooks on episcopal and other clerical duties and
responsibilities toward congregations. These works set standards for all
later bishops and are still observed in many churches.
Besides the bishops and their subordinates the priests, who tended to
the spiritual and material needs of Christians living in the world—the
“secular clergy”—there also existed communities of monks and religious
women who had fled the world. These communities were independent,
although nominally under the control of the local bishop, and they
followed diverse rules of life—hence their designation as “regular
clergy” (from regula, “rule”). The most influential monastic rule in
Latin Christianity after the 8th century was that of Benedict of Nursia
(c. 480–c. 547). Benedict’s rule provided for a monastic day of work,
prayer, and contemplation, offering psychological balance in the monk’s
life. It also elevated the dignity of manual labour in the service of
God, long scorned by the elites of antiquity. Benedict’s monastery at
Monte Cassino, south of Rome, became one of the greatest centres of
Benedictine monasticism.
The origins of monasticism lay in the ascetic practices of Egyptian
and Syrian monks, which were transplanted to western Europe through
texts such as the 4th-century Latin translation of the Life of Saint
Antony (by Patriarch Athanasius of Alexandria) and through widely
traveled observers such as the theologian and monk John Cassian
(360–435). These Mediterranean-wide influences were among the last
examples of the communications network of the older, ecumenical
Mediterranean world. Monasticism developed and sustained a powerful
ascetic dimension in both Greek and Latin Christianity that increased in
importance as monasticism itself came to define the ideal of clerical
life in the West.
In the case of Martin (316–397), a former Roman soldier turned
wandering holy man, monastic asceticism was combined with the office
episcopal, as Martin eventually became bishop of Tours in Gaul. He
emphasized the conversion of rural pagans, as well as ministering to the
urban and rural elites. In the Iberian Peninsula the work of the monk
and bishop Martin of Braga (c. 515–580) was also devoted to the
religious instruction of rustics. His work provided an influential model
for the later conversion of northern and eastern Europe.
While Greek Christians called their church and religion Orthodox,
Latin Christians adopted the term Catholic (from catholicus,
“universal”). The term catholic Christianity was originally used to
authenticate a normative, orthodox Christian cult (system of religious
belief and ritual) on the grounds of its universality and to
characterize different beliefs and practices as heterodox on the grounds
that they were merely local and did not reflect duration, unanimity, or
universality. These three characteristics of Latin orthodoxy were
defined by the 5th-century monastic writer Vincent of Lérins (died c.
450) and adopted generally throughout the Latin church.
Devotional movements that differed from the norms of orthodoxy were
defined as heterodoxy, or heresy. The earliest of these were several
forms of Judaizing Christianity and Gnosticism, a dualist belief in
asceticism and spiritual enlightenment. Once Christianity was
established throughout the empire, other local movements were also
condemned. Donatism, the belief among many North African Christians that
Christian leaders who had bowed to pagan imperial persecution before 313
had lost their priestly status and needed to be reordained, was the
first major heterodox practice to be considered—and condemned—at an
imperial church council (411). Other movements were Arianism, which
challenged the divinity of Jesus, and Pelagianism, which denied original
sin and emphasized purely human abilities to achieve salvation. Other
beliefs, usually those that contradicted increasingly normative
doctrines of Trinitarianism (the belief that the Godhead includes three
coequal, coeternal, and consubstantial persons) or Christology (the
interpretation of the nature of Christ), were also condemned as heresy.
Normative Christianity, which was expressed in imperial legislation,
church councils, and the works of influential Christian writers,
gradually became the faith of Europe’s new regional rulers. Within that
broad, universal ideology, however, many of the new kings and peoples
based their claims to legitimacy and a common identity on their own
versions of Latin Christianity, as expressed in local law, ritual,
saints’ cults, sacred spaces and shrines, and saints’ relics. The cults
of saints and their relics served to territorialize devotion, and
control over them was a distinctive sign of legitimate power. Although
the older empire and the new, nonimperial lands in Europe into which a
new culture expanded came to call themselves Christianitas
(“Christendom”), they were in practice divided into many self-contained
entities that have been called “micro-Christendoms,” each based on the
devotional identity of king, clerics, and people.
The Middle Ages » Late antiquity: the reconfiguration of the Roman world
» Kings and peoples
The kings of new peoples ruled as much in Roman style as they could,
issuing laws written in Latin for their own peoples and their Roman
subjects and striking coins that imitated imperial coinage. They also
sponsored the composition of “ethnic” and genealogical histories that
attributed to themselves and their peoples, however recently assembled,
an identity and antiquity rivaling that of Rome. Although the Romans,
who called their own society a populus (“civil people”), used the term
rex (“king”) only for rulers of peoples at lower levels of sociocultural
development, the political order of kings and peoples became a
commonplace in Europe in late antiquity and would remain so until the
19th century. Some of these kingdoms, especially that of the Visigoths
in southern Gaul and later in Iberia, also modeled themselves on the
ancient Hebrew kingdoms as described in Scripture. They borrowed and
adapted some ancient Jewish rituals, such as liturgically anointing the
ruler with oil and reminding him in sermons, prayers, and meetings of
church councils that he was God’s servant, with spiritual and political
responsibilities that legitimized his power.
As the cultures associated with the new kings and peoples spread
throughout western Europe from the 5th to the 8th centuries, they
influenced political and religious change in areas that the empire had
never ruled—initially Ireland, then northern Britain, the lower
Rhineland, and trans-Rhenish Europe (the lands east of the Rhine River).
The bishop and the monk were two of the most remarkable and longest
enduring religious and social inventions of late antiquity; the
barbarian kingdoms were a third. Although many of the latter did not
survive, their experiments in Christian kingship, as represented in
texts, ritual, pictures, and objects, began a long tradition in European
political life and thought.
The Middle Ages » Late antiquity: the reconfiguration of the Roman world
» The great commission
The process of expansion was also driven by a missionary mandate.
Reflecting a new, literal, and personal understanding of Jesus’ command
in the Gospels to baptize and to proclaim the word of God (Matthew
28:19; Mark 16:15), the work of conversion to Christianity was extended
to all peoples, not just to those of the empire. Conversion was carried
out at first by individual Christians acting on their own, not as agents
of an organized church. Greek Christians from Constantinople also
undertook missionary work, sometimes individually but also as an
increasingly prominent aspect of Byzantine imperial diplomacy in the
Balkans and north of the Danube valley and the Black Sea. In the eastern
parts of the Byzantine Empire, communities of Nestorian Christians, who
stressed the independence of the human and divine persons of Christ,
moved beyond the imperial frontiers, first into Persia and then farther
east. By the 10th century a long string of such settlements ran along
the Silk Road from the Mediterranean to China.
Individual conversion stories were modeled on that of St. Paul the
Apostle (Acts of the Apostles 9–10), which itself was echoed in the
Confessions of St. Augustine. Individual conversion experiences touched
people in all walks of life: Martin of Tours, the soldier turned ascetic
and bishop; the Gallo-Roman aristocrats Sulpicius Severus—who wrote the
influential life of Martin—and Caesarius of Arles; and the free
Romano-Briton St. Patrick, who had been a slave in pagan Ireland and
returned to convert his former captors.
But the most widely accepted model of conversion of both religious
belief and practice was collective—that of a ruler and his followers
together as a new Christian people. In this way, the king and church
integrated rulership with clerical teaching and the development of the
liturgy and with the definition of sacred space, control of sanctity,
and the rituals surrounding key moments in human life, from baptism to
death and burial. The most notable of the collective conversions were
that of the Visigoths from Arian to Catholic Christianity in 589, that
of the Frankish leader Clovis by his Catholic Burgundian wife Clotilda
and the Gallo-Roman bishop Remigius of Reims about the turn of the 6th
century, and that of Aethelberht of Kent by St. Augustine of Canterbury.
As Romans and non-Romans locally assimilated into new peoples during
the 6th and 7th centuries, non-Romans, as had Romans before them, became
Christian monks, higher clergy, and sometimes saints. In the late 5th
century the conversion of Ireland, the first Christianized territory
that had never been part of the Roman Empire, brought the particularly
Irish ascetic practice of self-exile to bear on missionary work. In the
6th century the Irish monk Columba (c. 521–597) exiled himself to the
island of Iona, from which he began to convert the peoples of
southwestern Scotland. Other Irish monk-exiles moved through the Rhine
valley, Austria, Bavaria, Switzerland, and northern Italy. Columban (c.
543–615), the most influential of these missionaries, greatly reformed
the devotional life of the Frankish nobility and founded monasteries at
Sankt Gallen, Luxeuil, and Bobbio. Irish and Scottish devotional
practices also influenced England, where Celtic forms of Christianity
clashed with Continental, especially Roman, forms—a conflict resolved at
the Synod of Whitby in 664, when Roman norms were adopted first for the
kingdom of Northumbria and later for other English kingdoms. Irish
influence remained strong in the English church, however, especially in
matters of learning, church reform, missionary exile, and clerical
organization.
From the late 7th century, English pilgrims visited Rome, creating a
strong devotional link between Rome and Britain, which was reasserted
wherever English missionary activity took place. Benedict Biscop, an
English noble, traveled to Rome several times, returning with Roman
books and pictures. He founded the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and
Jarrow (the saintly scholar Bede was a monk of Wearmouth-Jarrow) and
escorted the learned Theodore of Tarsus back to England when Theodore
was appointed archbishop of Canterbury. Theodore’s pastoral and
educational activities greatly enhanced English clerical culture,
producing both a network of schools and a missionary consciousness that
sent English monks, like their Irish predecessors, to the Continent. The
most influential of these figures was Boniface (c. 675–754), the first
archbishop of Mainz, who spent much of his adult life in missionary and
reform work in and around the edges of the kingdom of the Franks. The
letters of Boniface demonstrate his respect for Rome and provide
important information about his missionary activities. His great
monastery of Fulda played an important role in both reform and
conversion.
The Middle Ages » Late antiquity: the reconfiguration of the Roman world
» The bishops of Rome
Throughout their history, the bishops of Rome enjoyed great respect and
veneration because of the antiquity of their see, its historical
orthodoxy, the relics of its martyrs (including Saints Peter and Paul
the Apostles), and the imperial and Christian history of the city of
Rome. The material conditions of the 6th and 7th centuries, however,
greatly limited any papal exercise of universal authority or influence,
and the popes developed relatively little theory about papal authority
of any kind over all Christians. Like other bishops, however, the
bishops of Rome benefited from the idea of traditio (Latin:
“tradition”), which stated that the authority of the Apostles had been
passed down to the Christian higher clergy. They also gradually assumed
more and more responsibility for the administration of the city itself.
Because Rome was Rome and because the properties of the Roman church
extended throughout Italy, the papal administration of the city and the
invocation of its Christian, rather than imperial, past slowly turned it
into the Rome of St. Peter, who accordingly assumed an increasingly
important role in medieval spirituality. This Christianized Rome was a
place that the diversified societies of western Europe could revere and
visit because of its devotional centrality in the Latin Christian world.
Between the 5th and the 11th century, many argued that, just as there
had been a hierarchy of cities in the old empire, there was a hierarchy
of bishops, and the bishop of Rome stood at its head. Although the idea
of papal supremacy in Latin Christendom found a number of papal and
nonpapal exponents during this period, it did not become dominant until
the late 11th century. Even before then, however, the affection and
respect for Rome built up in England and in the kingdom of the Franks
did much to increase the attractiveness of the papacy.
The Middle Ages » Late antiquity: the reconfiguration of the Roman world
» The Mediterranean world divided
During the 7th and 8th centuries, new invasions of the eastern part of
the empire and the emergence of Islam, first in the Arabian Peninsula
and then to the west in Egypt and Numidia and to the east in Persia,
divided the old Mediterranean ecumenical world into three distinct
culture zones: East Rome, or Byzantium; Islam; and Latin Europe.
Byzantium and western Europe remained long on the defensive against
Islamic pressures, which extended to the conquest of the Iberian
Peninsula in 711, Sicily in 902, and Anatolia in the 11th century. Each
of these three cultures developed its own character based on different
uses of and attitudes toward the Roman-Mediterranean ecumenical past.
They maintained diplomatic and commercial contact with each other,
though sometimes on a much-reduced scale, and continued to influence
each other culturally even as they became more distinct. In spite of
their increasing distinctiveness, they were never entirely separated,
since both trade and the transmission of ideas passed through their
porous edges. In addition, large numbers of Jews and Christians
continued to live as privileged religious aliens in most of the Muslim
world.
The Middle Ages » The Frankish ascendancy » The Merovingian dynasty
In the late 5th and early 6th centuries, Clovis (c. 466–511), the
warrior-leader of one of the groups of peoples collectively known as the
Franks, established a strong independent monarchy in what are now the
northern part of France and the southwestern part of Belgium. He
expanded into southern Gaul, driving the Visigoths across the Pyrenees,
and established a strong Frankish presence east of the Rhine. His power
was recognized by the eastern emperor Anastasius, who made him a Roman
consul (a high-ranking magistrate). In the generations following the
death of Clovis, the Frankish kingdom was often divided into the two
kingdoms of Neustria and Austrasia, though it was occasionally reunited
under Clovis’s successors, the Merovingian dynasty. It was later
reunited under the lordship and (after 751) monarchy of the eastern
Frankish Arnulfing-Pippinid family (later known as the Carolingian
dynasty), which included Pippin II and his successors Charles Martel,
Pippin III, and Charlemagne (reigned 768–814). This dynasty brought much
of western Europe under Frankish control and established diplomatic
relations with Britain, Iberia, Rome, Constantinople, Christians in the
Holy Land, and even Hārūn al-Rashīd, the great caliph in Baghdad.
The Middle Ages » The Frankish ascendancy » Charlemagne and the
Carolingian dynasty
Charlemagne and his successors also patronized a vast project that they
and their clerical advisers called correctio—restoring the fragmented
western European world to an earlier idealized condition. During the
Carolingian Renaissance, as it is called by modern scholars, Frankish
rulers supported monastic studies and manuscript production, attempted
to standardize monastic practice and rules of life, insisted on high
moral and educational standards for clergy, adopted and disseminated
standard versions of canon law and the liturgy, and maintained a regular
network of communications throughout their dominions.
Charlemagne drew heavily on most of the kingdoms of Christian Europe,
even those he conquered, for many of his advisers. Ireland sent Dicuil
the geographer. The kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, drawn close to Rome
and the Franks during the 8th century, produced the widely circulated
works of Bede and the ecclesiastical reformer Boniface. Also from
England was the scholar Alcuin, a product of the great school at York,
who served as Charlemagne’s chief adviser on ecclesiastical and other
matters until becoming abbot of the monastery of St. Martin of Tours.
Charlemagne’s relations with the kingdoms in England remained cordial,
and his political and intellectual reforms in turn shaped the
development of a unified English monarchy and culture under Alfred
(reigned 871–899) and his successors in the 9th and 10th centuries.
Although the Visigothic kingdom fell to Arab and Berber armies in
711, the small Christian principalities in the north of the Iberian
Peninsula held out. They too produced remarkable scholars, some of whom
were eventually judged to hold heretical beliefs. The Christological
theology of adoptionism, which held that Christ in his humanity is the
adopted son of God, greatly troubled the Carolingian court and generated
a substantial literature on both sides before the belief was declared
heterodox. But Iberia also produced scholars for Charlemagne’s service,
particularly Theodulf of Orleans, one of the emperor’s most influential
advisers.
The kingdom of the Lombards, established in northern and central
Italy in the later 6th century, was originally Arian but converted to
Catholic Christianity in the 7th century. Nevertheless, Lombard
opposition to Byzantine forces in northern Italy and Lombard pressure on
the bishops of Rome led a number of 8th-century popes to call on the
assistance of the Carolingians. Pippin invaded Italy twice in the 750s,
and in 774 Charlemagne conquered the Lombard kingdom and assumed its
crown. Among the Lombards who migrated for a time to Charlemagne’s court
were the grammarian Peter of Pisa and the historian Paul the Deacon.
From 778 to 803 Charlemagne not only stabilized his rule in Frankland
and Italy but also conquered and converted the Saxons and established
frontier commands, or marches, at the most vulnerable edges of his
territories. He built a residence for himself and his court at Aachen,
which was called “a second Rome.” He remained on excellent terms with
the bishops of Rome, Adrian I (reigned 772–795) and Leo III (reigned
795–816). Scholars began to call Charlemagne “the father of Europe” and
“the lighthouse of Europe.” Although the lands under his rule were often
referred to as “the kingdom of Europe,” contemporaries recognized them
as forming an empire, much of which extended well beyond the imperial
frontiers of Rome. Because of its use in reference to the empire, the
old geographical term Europe came to be invested with a political and
cultural meaning that it did not have in Greco-Roman antiquity.
In 800 Charlemagne extracted Leo III from severe political
difficulties in Rome (Leo had been violently attacked by relatives of
the former pope and accused of various crimes). On Christmas Day of that
year Leo crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans, a title that
Charlemagne’s successors also adopted. Although the title gave
Charlemagne no resources that he did not already possess, it did not
please all his subjects, and it greatly displeased the Byzantines. But
it survived the Frankish monarchy and remained the most respected title
of a lay ruler in Europe until the Holy Roman Empire, as it was known
from the mid-12th century, was abolished by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806,
a little more than 1,000 years after Charlemagne was crowned. Historians
still debate whether the coronation of 800 indicated a backward-looking
last manifestation of the older world of late antiquity or a new
organization of the elements of what later became Europe.
Charlemagne’s kingdoms, but not the imperial title, were divided
after the death of his son Louis I (the Pious) in 840 into the regions
of West Francia, the Middle Kingdom, and East Francia. The last of these
regions gradually assumed control over the Middle Kingdom north of the
Alps. In addition, an independent kingdom of Italy survived into the
late 10th century. The imperial title went to one of the rulers of these
kingdoms, usually the one who could best protect Rome, until it briefly
ceased to be used in the early 10th century.
The Middle Ages » The Frankish ascendancy » Carolingian decline and its
consequences
After the Carolingian dynasty died out in the male line in East Francia
in 911, Conrad I, the first of a series of territorial dukes, was
elected king. He was followed by a series of vigorous and ambitious
rulers from the Saxon (919–1024) and Salian (1024–1125) dynasties. Otto
I (reigned 936–967), the most successful of the Saxon rulers, claimed
the crown of the old Lombard kingdom in Italy in 951, defeated an
invading Hungarian army at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, and was
crowned emperor in Rome in 962. In contrast to the kings of East
Francia, the rulers of West Francia, whose last Carolingian ruler was
succeeded in 987 by the long-lasting dynasty of Hugh Capet (the Capetian
dynasty), had difficulty ruling even their domains in the middle Seine
valley, and they were overshadowed by the power of the territorial lords
who had established themselves in principalities in the rest of the
kingdom.
The end of Carolingian expansion in the early 9th century and the
inability of several kings to field sufficiently large armies and reward
their followers were two consequences of the division of Charlemagne’s
empire. In addition, the empire now shared borders with hostile peoples
in the Slavic east and in the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Iberia.
The end of expansion meant that the basis of the economy shifted from
mixed forest-agricultural labour and income drawn from plunder and
tribute to more-intensive cultivation of lands within the kingdoms.
Accordingly, kings were forced to draw on local resources to reward
their followers. The consequences of these military and economic changes
included a general weakening of royal authority, the transformation of
the Carolingian aristocracy into active lords of the land, and a loss of
social status for the labourers who worked the land.
In the 9th and early 10th centuries a series of invasions from
Scandinavia, the lower Danube valley, and North Africa greatly weakened
the Carolingian world. The divisions within the Frankish empire impaired
its ability to resist the Viking and Hungarian invasions but did not
destroy it. Kings and warlords ultimately either turned back the
invaders, as Otto I did in 955, or absorbed them into their territories,
as the kings of West Francia did with the Vikings in Normandy. In
England the invasions destroyed all of the older kingdoms except Wessex,
whose rulers, starting with Alfred, expanded their power until they
created a single kingdom of England.
Although two kinds of invaders—the Scandinavians and the
Hungarians—became acculturated and Christianized during the next several
centuries, creating the Christian kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, Sweden,
and Hungary, the Islamic world remained apart, extending from Iberia and
Morocco eastward to the western edges of China and Southeast Asia. In
the case of western Europe, the attacks of the 9th and 10th centuries
were the last outside invasions until the Allied landings during World
War II; indeed, for a period of nearly 1,000 years western Europe was
the only part of the world that was not invaded. Western Europe
developed internally without outside interference, expanded
geographically, increased demographically, improved materially, and
engaged in cultural, commercial, and technological exchanges with
parallel civilizations.
The Middle Ages » Growth and innovation
Although historians disagree about the extent of the social and material
damage caused by the 9th- and 10th-century invasions, they agree that
demographic growth began during the 10th century and perhaps earlier.
They have also identified signs of the reorganization of lordship and
agricultural labour, a process in which members of an order of
experienced and determined warriors concentrated control of land in
their own hands and coerced a largely free peasantry into subjection.
Thus did the idea of the three orders of society—those who fight, those
who pray, and those who labour—come into use to describe the results of
the ascendancy of the landholding aristocracy and its clerical partners.
In cooperation with bishops and ecclesiastical establishments,
particularly great monastic foundations such as Cluny (established 910),
the nobility of the late 11th and 12th centuries reorganized the
agrarian landscape and rural society of western Europe and made it the
base of urbanization, which was also well under way in the 11th century.
The Middle Ages » Growth and innovation » Demographic and agricultural
growth
It has been estimated that between 1000 and 1340 the population of
Europe increased from about 38.5 million people to about 73.5 million,
with the greatest proportional increase occurring in northern Europe,
which trebled its population. The rate of growth was not so rapid as to
create a crisis of overpopulation; it was linked to increased
agricultural production, which yielded a sufficient amount of food per
capita, permitted the expansion of cultivated land, and enabled some of
the population to become nonagricultural workers, thereby creating a new
division of labour and greater economic and cultural diversity.
The late Roman countryside and its patterns of life—a social pattern
of landlords, free peasants, half-free workers, and slaves and an
economic pattern of cultivated fields and orchards and the use of thick
forests and their products—survived well into the Carolingian period. In
the late 9th century, however, political circumstances led landholders
to intensify the cultivation of their lands. They did this by reducing
the status of formerly free peasants to dependent servitude and by
slowly elevating the status of slaves to the same dependency, creating a
rural society of serfs. The old Latin word for slave, servus, now came
to designate a category of rural workers who were not chattel property
but who were firmly bound to their lord’s land. The new word for slave,
sclavus, was derived from the source of many slaves, the Slavic lands of
the east.
During the 11th and 12th centuries the chief social distinction in
western European society was that between the free and the unfree. For
two centuries the status of serfdom was imposed on people whose
ancestors had been free and who themselves would become free only when
the rise of a money economy in the late 12th century made free,
rent-paying peasants more economically attractive to lords than bound
serfs. The aristocracy was able to accomplish this because of weakening
royal power and generosity and because of its assumption of the bannum
(“ban”), the old public and largely royal power to command and punish
(now called “banal jurisdiction”). It announced its new claims by
calling them “customs” and adjudicated them in local courts.
The aristocracy supervised the clearing of forest for the expansion
of cereal cultivation but restricted the remaining forest to itself for
hunting. It also forced its dependents to use its mills and local
markets, to provide various labour services, and to settle more densely
in the villages, which were slowly coordinated with an expanded system
of parishes (local churches with lay patrons, to which peasants had to
pay the tithe, or one-tenth of their produce). Serfdom was gradually
eliminated in western Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries as a
result of economic changes that made agricultural labour less
financially advantageous to lords. During the same period, however,
serfdom increased in eastern Europe, where it lasted until the 19th
century.
The new stratification of society into the categories of free and
unfree was accompanied by the transformation of the late Carolingian
aristocratic family from a widespread association of both paternal and
maternal relatives to a narrower lineage, in which paternal ancestry and
paternal control of the disposition of inheritance dominated. Family
memory restricted itself to a founding paternal ancestor, ignoring the
line of maternal ancestors, and the new lineages identified themselves
with a principal piece of property, from which they often took a family
name. They also patronized religious establishments, which memorialized
the families in prayers, enhanced their local prestige, and often
provided them burial in their precincts.
The new lords of the land identified themselves primarily as
warriors. Because new technologies of warfare, including heavy cavalry,
were expensive, fighting men required substantial material resources as
well as considerable leisure to train. The economic and political
transformation of the countryside filled these two needs. The old armies
of free men of different levels of wealth were replaced by new armies of
specialist knights. The term knight (Latin miles) came into more
frequent use to designate anyone who could satisfy the new military
requirements, which included the wealthiest and most powerful lords as
well as fighting men from far lower levels of society. The new order
gradually developed its own ethos, reflected in the ideal of chivalry,
the knight’s code of conduct. The distinction between free and unfree
was reinforced by the distinction between those who fought, even at the
lowest level, and those who could not. Those who functioned at the
lowest level of military service worked hard to distinguish themselves
from those who laboured in the fields.
The Middle Ages » Growth and innovation » Technological innovations
The increases in population and agricultural productivity were
accompanied by a technological revolution that introduced new sources of
power and a cultural “machine-mindedness,” both of which were
incorporated into a wide spectrum of economic enterprises. The chief new
sources of power were the horse, the water mill, and the windmill.
Europeans began to breed both the specialized warhorse, adding stirrups
to provide the mounted warrior a better seat and greater striking force,
and the draft horse, now shod with iron horseshoes that protected the
hooves from the damp clay soils of northern Europe. The draft horse was
faster and more efficient than the ox, the traditional beast of burden.
The invention of the new horse collar in the 10th century, a device that
pulled from the horse’s shoulders rather than from its neck and
windpipe, immeasurably increased the animal’s pulling power.
The extensive network of rivers in western Europe spurred the
development of the water mill, not only for grinding grain into flour
but also by the 12th century for converting simple rotary motion into
reciprocal motion. Where water was not readily available, Europeans
constructed windmills, which had been imported from the Middle East,
thereby spreading the mill to even more remote locations.
In heavily forested and mountainous parts of western Europe,
foresters, charcoal burners, and miners formed separate communities,
providing timber, fuel, and metallic ores in abundance. The demands of
domestic and public building and shipbuilding threatened to deforest
much of Europe as early as the 13th century. Increasingly refined
metallurgical technology produced not only well-tempered swords,
daggers, and armour for warriors but also elaborate domestic ware.
Glazed pottery and glass also appeared even in humble homes, which were
increasingly built of stone rather than wood and thatch.
The most striking and familiar examples of the technological
revolution are the great Gothic cathedrals and other churches, which
were constructed from the 12th century onward. Universally admired for
their soaring height and stained-glass windows, they required
mathematically precise designs; considerable understanding of the
properties of subsoils, stone, and timber; near-professional
architectural skills; complex financial planning; and a skilled labour
force. They are generally regarded as the most-accomplished engineering
feats of the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages » Growth and innovation » Urban growth
The experience of building great churches was replicated in the
development of the material fabric of the new and expanded cities. The
cities of the Carolingian world were few and small. Their functions were
limited to serving the needs of the kings, bishops, or monasteries that
inhabited them. Some, especially those that were close to the
Mediterranean, were reconfigured Roman cities. In the north a Roman
nucleus sometimes became the core of a new city, but just as often
cities emerged because of the needs of their lords. The northern cities
were established as local market centres and then developed into centres
of diversified artisanal production with growing merchant populations.
In the 10th and 11th centuries new cities were founded and existing
cities increased in area and population. They were usually enclosed
within a wall once their inhabitants thought that the city had reached
the limits of its expansion; as populations grew and suburbs began to
surround the walls, many cities built new and larger walls to enclose
the new space. The succession of concentric rings of town walls offers a
history of urban growth in many cities. Inhabitants also took pride in
their city’s appearance, as evidenced by the elaborate decorations on
city gates, fountains, town halls (in northern Italy from the 10th
century), and other public spaces. Cities were cultural as well as
economic and political centres, and their decoration was as important to
their inhabitants as their water systems, defenses, and marketplaces.
The cities attracted people from the countryside, where the
increasing productivity of the farms was freeing many peasants from
working on the land. Various mercantile and craft guilds were formed
beginning in the 10th century to protect their members’ common
interests. The merchants’ guilds and other associations also contributed
to the emergence of the sworn commune, or the self-regulating city
government, originally chartered by a bishop, count, or king. The city
distinguished itself from the countryside, even as it extended its
influence there. During the 12th century this distinction was recognized
culturally, when the Latin word urbanitas (“urbanity”) came to be
applied to the idea of acceptable manners and informed Christian belief,
while rusticitas (“rusticity”) came to mean inelegance and backwardness.
Despite this awareness, cities had to protect their food supplies and
their trade and communication routes, and thus in both southern and
northern Europe the city and its contado (region surrounding the city)
became closely linked.
In some areas of northern Europe, particular kinds of manufacturing
became prominent, especially dyeing, weaving, and finishing woolen
cloth. Wool production was the economic enterprise in which the cities
of the southern Low Countries took pride of place, and other cities
developed elaborate manufacturing of metalwork and armaments. Still
others became market centres of essential products that could not be
produced locally, such as wine. This specialized production led to the
proliferation of long-range trade and the creation of communications
networks along the rivers of western Europe, where many cities were
located. Although some lords, including the kings of England, were
reluctant to recognize the towns’ autonomy, most eventually agreed that
the rapidly increasing value of the towns as centres of manufacturing
and trade was worth the risk of their practical independence.
Originally a product of the agrarian dynamic that shaped society
after the year 1000, the growing towns of western Europe became
increasingly important, and their citizens acquired great wealth,
usually in cooperation rather than conflict with their rulers. The towns
helped transform the agrarian world out of which they were originally
created into a precapitalist manufacturing and market economy that
influenced both urban and rural development.
The Middle Ages » Reform and renewal
A number of the movements for ecclesiastical reform that emerged in the
11th century attempted to sharpen the distinction between clerical and
lay status. Most of these movements drew upon the older Christian ideas
of spiritual renewal and reform, which were thought necessary because of
the degenerative effects of the passage of time on fallen human nature.
They also drew upon standards of monastic conduct, especially those
regarding celibacy and devotional rigour, that had been articulated
during the Carolingian period and were now extended to all clergy,
regular (monks) and secular (priests). Virginity, long seen by Christian
thinkers as an equivalent to martyrdom, was now required of all clergy.
It has been argued that the requirement of celibacy was established to
protect ecclesiastical property, which had greatly increased, from being
alienated by the clergy or from becoming the basis of dynastic power.
The doctrine of clerical celibacy and freedom from sexual pollution, the
idea that the clergy should not be dependent on the laity, and the
insistence on the libertas (“liberty”) of the church—the freedom to
accomplish its divinely ordained mission without interference from any
secular authority—became the basis of the reform movements that took
shape during this period. Most of them originated in reforming
monasteries in transalpine Europe, which cooperative lay patrons and
supporters protected from predatory violence.
By the middle of the 11th century, the reform movements reached Rome
itself, when the emperor Henry III intervened in a schism that involved
three claimants to the papal throne. At the Synod of Sutri in 1046 he
appointed a transalpine candidate of his own—Suidger, archbishop of
Bamberg, who became Pope Clement II (1046–47)—and removed the papal
office from the influence of the local Roman nobility, which had largely
controlled it since the 10th century. A series of popes, including Leo
IX (1049–54) and Urban II (1088–99), promoted what is known as Gregorian
Reform, named for its most zealous proponent, Pope Gregory VII
(1073–85). They urged reform throughout Europe by means of their
official correspondence and their sponsorship of regional church
councils. They also restructured the hierarchy, placing the papal office
at the head of reform efforts and articulating a systematic claim to
papal authority over clergy and, in very many matters, over laity as
well.
The emotional intensity of ecclesiastical reform led to outbursts of
religious enthusiasm from both supporters and opponents. Many laypeople
also enthusiastically supported reform; indeed, their support was a key
factor in its ultimate success. The increase in lay piety on the side of
reform was indicated by the events of 1095, when Urban II called on lay
warriors to cease preying on the weak and on each other and to undertake
the liberation of the Holy Land from its Muslim conquerors and
occupiers. The enormous military expedition that captured Jerusalem in
1099 and established for a century the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, an
expedition only much later called the First Crusade, is as dramatic a
sign as possible of the vitality and devotion of clerical and lay
reformers.
The First Crusade had other, unintended effects. The success of
Genoa, Pisa, and other Italian maritime cities in supplying the
Christian outposts in the Holy Land increased their already considerable
wealth and political power, which were soon comparable to that of
Venice. Proposals for later Crusades often led to searching analyses,
not only of specific military, financial, and logistical requirements
but also of the social reforms that such ventures would require in the
kingdoms of Europe. Finally, by bringing Latin Christians other than
pilgrims deeper into western Eurasia than they had ever been before, the
Crusade movement led Europeans in the 12th century to a greater interest
in distant parts of the world.
The reform movement had a pronounced effect on church and society. It
produced an independent clerical order, hierarchically organized under
the popes. The clergy claimed both a teaching authority (magisterium)
and a disciplinary authority, based on theology and canon law, that
defined orthodoxy and heterodoxy and regulated much of lay and all of
clerical life. The clergy also expressed its authority through a series
of energetic church councils, from the first Lateran Council in 1123 to
the fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and greatly enhanced both the ritual
and legal authority of the popes.
The reform movement also erupted in a violent conflict, known as the
Investiture Controversy, between Gregory VII and the emperor Henry IV
(reigned 1056–1105/06). In this struggle the pope claimed extraordinary
authority to correct the emperor; he twice declared the emperor deposed
before Henry forced him to flee Rome to Salerno, where he died in exile.
Despite Gregory’s apparent defeat, the conflicts undermined imperial
claims to authority and shattered the Carolingian-Ottonian image of the
emperor as the lay equal of the bishop of Rome, responsible for acting
in worldly matters to protect the church. The emperor, like any other
layman, was now subordinate to the moral discipline of churchmen.
Some later emperors, notably the members of the Hohenstaufen
dynasty—including Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–90), his son Henry VI
(1190–97), and his grandson Frederick II (1220–50)—reasserted modified
claims for imperial authority and intervened in Italy with some success.
But Barbarossa’s political ambitions were thwarted by the northern
Italian cities of the Lombard League and the forces of Pope Alexander
III at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. Both Henry VI and Frederick II,
who had united the imperial and Lombard crowns and added to them that of
the rich and powerful Norman kingdom of Sicily, were checked by similar
resistance. Frederick himself was deposed by Pope Innocent IV in 1245.
Succession disputes following Frederick’s death and that of his
immediate successors led to the Great Interregnum of 1250–73, when no
candidate received enough electoral votes to become emperor. The
interregnum ended only with the election of the Habsburg ruler Rudolf I
(1273–91), which resulted in the increasing provincialization of the
imperial office in favour of Habsburg dynastic and territorial
interests. In 1356 the Luxembourg emperor Charles IV (1316–78) issued
the Golden Bull, which established the number of imperial electors at
seven (three ecclesiastical and four lay princes) and articulated their
powers.
Although the emperor possessed the most prestigious of all lay
titles, the actual authority of his office was very limited. Both the
Habsburgs and their rivals used the office to promote their dynastic
self-interests until the Habsburg line ascended the throne permanently
with the reign of Frederick III (1442–93), the last emperor to be
crowned in Rome. The imperial office and title were abolished when
Napoleon dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.
The Middle Ages » The consequences of reform
The conflicts between emperors and popes constituted one conspicuous
result of the reform movement. The transformation and new
institutionalization of learning, the reconstitution of the church, the
intensification of ecclesiastical discipline, and the growth of
territorial monarchies were four others. Each of these developments was
supported by the agricultural, technological, and commercial expansion
of the 10th and 11th centuries.
The Middle Ages » The consequences of reform » The transformation of
thought and learning
The polemics of the papal-imperial debate revealed the importance of
establishing a set of canonical texts on the basis of which both sides
could argue. A number of academic disciplines, particularly the study of
dialectic, had developed considerably between the 9th and 12th
centuries. By the 12th century it had become the most widely studied
intellectual discipline, in part because it was an effective tool for
constructing and refuting arguments. The Gregorian reformers had also
based their arguments on canon law, and a number of Gregorian and
post-Gregorian collections, particularly that of Ivo of Chartres (c.
1040–1116), pointed the way toward the creation of a commonly accessible
canon law. That goal was achieved in about 1140–50 in two successive
recensions (perhaps by two different authors) of a lawbook called
Concordia discordantium canonum (“Concordance of Discordant Canons”), or
Decretum, attributed to Master Gratian. The Decretum became the standard
introductory text of ecclesiastical law. Simultaneously, the full text
of the 6th-century body of Roman law, later called the Corpus Iuris
Civilis (“Body of Civil Law”), began to circulate in northern Italy and
was taught in the schools of Bologna. The learned character of the
revived Roman law contributed powerfully to the development of legal
science throughout Europe in the following centuries.
Early in the 12th century, Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096–1141),
schoolmaster of a house of canons just outside Paris, wrote a
description of all the subjects of learning, the Didascalicon. Hugh’s
contemporary, Peter Abelard (1079–1142), taught dialectic at Paris to
crowds of students, many of whom became high officials in ecclesiastical
and secular institutions. The teaching methods of scholars such as
Gratian, Hugh, Abelard, and others became the foundation of
Scholasticism, the method used by the new schools in the teaching of
arts, law, medicine, and theology. In theology itself, comparable
canonical work was done by Peter Lombard (c. 1100–60) in his
Sententiarum libri iv (“Four Books of Sentences”), which became, next to
the Bible, the fundamental teaching text of theology.
But not all Christians admired the new Scholastic theology. The
Scholastic teaching of Scripture replaced the early contemplative
monastic style of exegesis with dialectical investigative techniques and
speculative theology. Many monks and some outraged laity thought that
Scripture was being mishandled, stripped of its dignity and mystery in
the service of feeble human logic and cold rationality. They did not,
however, stop the tide, as Scholastic theology created a complex,
effective, and highly persuasive means of discussing both the
complexities of divinity and the moral obligations of Christians on
earth.
As groups of teachers organized themselves into guilds in the late
12th and early 13th centuries, they and their students received
imperial, papal, and royal privileges. About 1200 these associations,
modeling themselves on ecclesiastical corporations, developed into the
first universities. During the remainder of the 13th century, clerical
teaching authority within the universities was articulated. The first
guilds were formed for the teaching of law at several schools in Bologna
and for the teaching of arts and theology at Paris and later at Oxford,
Cambridge, and other towns. With the foundation of the University of
Prague in 1348, the model crossed the Rhine River for the first time. By
the 15th century it had become a standard fixture of European learning.
University teachers insisted on the right to define teaching
authority. Proclaiming the earliest version of academic freedom, they
rejected outside interference and asserted that their professional
competence alone entitled them to determine the content of disciplines
and the standards for admitting, examining, graduating, and certifying
students. They also transformed both the written script and the nature
of the material book. Since teaching required a readable script and
books whose texts were as close to identical as possible, the
distinctive “Gothic” or “black letter” script was developed, which
standardized abbreviations and the writing style used in texts.
The presence of universities of teachers and students in western
European society was significant in itself. The universities reflected
favourably on the cities in which they were located and on the rulers
who protected them. The rulers also benefited from the opportunity to
recruit increasingly educated public servants and bureaucrats from these
institutions. The church benefited too, since the universities produced
theologians, canon lawyers, and other officials that the church—even the
papal office—now seemed to require.
The universities aided in the recovery and dissemination of
Aristotelianism, particularly in the physical sciences and metaphysics.
Only the new universities, moreover, could have housed and spread the
intellectual work of Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–1274) and Bonaventure
(1217–74), the greatest theologians of the 13th century, and of Henry of
Segusio (Hostiensis; c. 1200–71) and Sinibaldo Fieschi (later Pope
Innocent IV, reigned 1243–54), the greatest canon lawyers of the
century.
The Middle Ages » The consequences of reform » The structure of
ecclesiastical and devotional life » Ecclesiastical organization
With the removal of the most offensive instances of lay influence in
ecclesiastical affairs, the organization of the universal church and
local churches acquired a symmetry and consistency hardly possible
before 1100. An 11th-century anonymous text that was accepted by canon
law identified two orders of Christians, the clergy and the laity. It
considered the clergy largely in a monastic context, indicating that the
new attention to the secular clergy had transferred to them the virtues
and discipline of monks. Although many monks were not ordained priests,
their disciplined, contemplative life was held up for centuries as the
ideal clerical model.
The work of the laity was the business of the world. The clergy,
however, considered itself far more important than the laity. Members of
the clergy themselves were ranked in terms of sacramental orders, minor
and major. When a boy or young man entered the clergy, he received the
tonsure, symbolizing his new status. He might then move in stages
through the minor orders: acolyte, exorcist, lector, and doorkeeper. At
the highest of minor orders the candidate could still leave the clergy.
Many clerics in minor orders served in the administration of secular and
ecclesiastical institutions. They also sometimes caused trouble in
secular society, since even they received benefit of clergy, or
exemption from trial in secular courts. Ordination to the major
orders—subdeacon (elevated to a major order by Pope Innocent III in
1215), deacon, and priest—entailed vows of chastity and conferred
sacramental powers on the recipient.
At the head of the Latin Christian church was the pope, whose powers
were now articulated in canon law, most of which was made by the popes
themselves and by their legal advisers. Not only did popes claim powers
over even secular rulers in many instances, but a number of rulers,
including King John of England (reigned 1199–1216), submitted their
kingdoms to the popes and received them back to govern for their new
spiritual and temporal masters. The popes also issued charters of
foundation for universities, convened church councils, called Crusades
and commissioned preachers to deliver Crusade sermons, and appointed
papal judges delegate or subdelegate to investigate specific problems.
In all these areas, as in the articulation of canon law, papal authority
directly affected the lives of all Christians, as well as the lives of
Jews and Muslims in their relations with Christians.
The popes were assisted by the College of Cardinals, which was
transformed during the papal-imperial conflict from a group of Roman
liturgical assistants into a body of advisers individually appointed by
the popes. Among its duties articulated in conciliar and papal decrees
of 1059 and 1179—rules still in effect in the Roman Catholic Church
today—was to elect the pope. A cardinal could be a cardinal bishop (if
the church he was given was outside the city of Rome, whose only bishop,
of course, was the pope himself), a cardinal priest, or a cardinal
deacon. Cardinals also had different roles. The cardinal bishop of
Ostia, for example, always crowned a new pope. For some time the senior
cardinal deacon gave the pope his papal name, a practice that began in
the 10th century, perhaps in imitation of monastic tradition.
The papacy developed other means to implement its authority. After
the Concordat of Worms (1122), which settled some aspects of the
Investiture Controversy, popes held regular assemblies of higher clergy
in church councils, the first of which was the first Lateran Council in
1123. Conciliar legislation was the means by which reform principles
were most efficiently formulated and disseminated to the highest
clerical levels. Although councils in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries
were closely controlled by the popes, later councils sometimes opposed
papal authority with claims to conciliar authority, a position generally
known as conciliarism. Papal legates, judges, and emissaries, widely
used by Gregory VII and later popes, were dispatched with full papal
authority to deal with issues in distant parts of Europe.
Papal collectors, who received funds owed to the popes for Crusading
or other purposes, were also essential components of papal government.
The papal chamberlain of Celestine III (1191–98), Cencio Savelli (later
Pope Honorius III; 1216–27), produced the Liber Censuum (“The Book of
the Census”) in 1192, the first comprehensive account of the sources of
papal funding. In this respect, as in the formal communications of the
papal chancery, the pope created an influential model, imitated by all
other European principalities and kingdoms. Although only four papal
registers (collections of important papal letters and decisions) from
before 1198 survive more or less intact, all registers since then have
been preserved.
The day-to-day work of the popes was carried out by the Roman Curia;
the name Curia Romana was first used by Urban II at the end of the 11th
century. The Curia consisted of the chancery; the Apostolic Camera, or
financial centre; the consistory, or legal office, including the Roman
Rota (chief papal court); and the Penitentiary, or spiritual and
confessional office. The popes were also the secular rulers of Rome and
the Papal States, and accordingly their servants included the rulers and
officials of these territories.
The popes ran afoul of local movements for greater independence,
including the revolution led by Arnold of Brescia, the priest and
religious dissident, in 1143. Revolts continued throughout the 13th
century and increased in frequency during the Avignon papacy (1305–78),
when the popes resided in Avignon, and during the Great Schism
(1378–1417), when there were two and then three claimants for the papal
office. (The crisis was resolved in 1415–18 at the Council of Constance,
which elected a new pope and restored papal authority over the city of
Rome and the Papal States.) When a pope could safely reside in Rome, he
worked at the church of St. John Lateran, his cathedral as bishop of the
city of Rome, and not at the Vatican, which was chiefly a pilgrimage
shrine. Only after Martin V (1417–31), the pope elected at the Council
of Constance, found that the papal quarters at the Lateran had fallen
into ruins was the papal residence and administration moved to the
Vatican.
Lower levels of the clerical hierarchy replicated the papal
administration on a smaller scale. The immense dioceses of northern
Europe, ruled by prince-archbishops (as in Cologne) or by prince-bishops
(as in Durham), were very different from the tiny rural dioceses of
southern Italy. Within the secular clergy the highest rank below the
pope was that of primate, who was usually the regional head of a group
of archbishops. The archbishops, or metropolitans, ruled archdioceses,
or provinces, holding provincial synods of clergy under their
jurisdiction, ruling administrative courts, and supervising the
suffragan bishops (bishops assigned to assist in the administration of
the archdiocese). The archbishop was expected to make regular visits to
the ecclesiastical institutions in his province and to hear appeals from
the verdicts of courts at lower levels.
The archdiocese was divided into dioceses, each ruled by a bishop,
who supervised his own administration and episcopal court. In
ecclesiastical tradition, bishops were considered the successors of the
Apostles, and a strong sense of episcopal collegiality between pope and
bishops survived well into the age of increased papal authority.
Episcopal courts included a chancery for the use of the bishop’s seal, a
judicial court under the direction of the official or the archdeacon,
financial officers, and archpriests (priests assigned to special
functions). The bishop’s church, the cathedral, was staffed by a chapter
(a body of clergy) and headed by a dean, who was specifically charged
with administering the cathedral and its property. The chapter was not
usually the bishop’s administrative staff and thus sometimes found
itself in conflict with the bishop. Struggles between bishop and chapter
were frequent and notorious in canon law courts, since they could be
appealed, like disputed episcopal elections, all the way to the papal
court.
Episcopal powers were extensive: only the bishop could consecrate
churches, ordain clergy, license preachers, or appoint teachers in
episcopal schools. The bishop’s pastoral responsibilities extended to
all Christians in his diocese. Moreover, since canon law touched the
lives of all Christians, episcopal legal officials held great power.
They visited diocesan institutions and presided over trials of those
accused of violating canon law, which concerned many areas that in
modern legal systems are subsumed under civil and criminal law, family
courts, and morals offenses.
The diocese was divided into deaconries for the archdeacons, which
might convoke lesser synods. Deaconries too had their own chancellors,
notaries, and judicial officers, as well as archpriests who assisted the
deacons. Since the archdeacon or official was usually the point of
contact between the laity and ecclesiastical discipline, they were often
the butt of satire and complaint. One topic said to have been proposed
for debate at a 13th-century university was: Can an archdeacon be saved?
At the lowest level of the clerical hierarchy was the parish, with
its priest, suffragan priests, vicars, and chaplains, who together
supervised the spiritual life of the majority of European laity. The
parish owned its church and the land that provided the priest’s income
(the glebe); additional income was derived from tithes collected from
all parishioners and often from an endowment. The priest was presented
to the bishop for ordination by a layman, cleric, or clerical
corporation with proprietary rights over the parish. In many cases, the
actual care of souls in a parish was in the hands of a vicar, who was
deputed by a patron to perform the priest’s duties when the priest was
away studying or occupied in other business. The parish priest also
administered the ecclesiastical calendar for his parishioners.
Parishioners themselves might belong to spiritual associations, called
confraternities, but all were expected to be baptized, to make
confession once a year (after the fourth Lateran Council prescribed this
in 1215), to take Holy Communion, to marry, and to be buried in the
parish churchyard. The parish was the level at which most people learned
their Christianity and the level at which most of them lived it.
The Middle Ages » The consequences of reform » The structure of
ecclesiastical and devotional life » Devotional life
The popes also supervised the regular clergy, which included the
religious orders of monks, canons regular (secular clergy who lived
collegiately according to a rule), and mendicants. Each of these orders
had a superior, who was advised by a chapter general that comprised
representatives of the religious houses of the order. Orders, like
dioceses, were organized according to regions, each having a regional
superior and holding regional chapters. Individual religious houses were
headed by an abbot or abbess (the mendicant orders had a slightly
different organization) and administered by a chancellor and
chamberlain. Provosts and deans usually supervised the property of each
house.
In the 12th century, new devotional movements (movements devoted to
Jesus or the saints) led to outbursts of religious dissent (with new
forms of ecclesiastical discipline devised to control them) and equally
passionate expressions of orthodox devotion. Although monasticism was by
then an old institution, one of the great themes of the century was the
search for the apostolic life as monks, canons, and laypeople might live
it. The canons regular were one result of this movement, as were new
monastic orders, particularly the Cistercian Order. But the most dynamic
movement was that of the mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the
Franciscans, founded in the early 13th century.
The Order of Friars Minor, founded by the layman Francis of Assisi
(1181/82–1226) to minister to the spiritual needs of the cities, spread
widely and rapidly, as did the Order of Preachers, founded by the canon
of Osma, Dominic of Guzmán (c. 1170–1221). These and other devotional
movements of laypeople were supported by Pope Innocent III and his
successors. The mendicant orders greatly influenced popular piety,
because they specialized in preaching in new churches that were built to
hold large crowds. Indeed, during this time the sermon came into its own
as the most effective mass medium in Europe. The mendicants also
increased devotion to the Virgin Mary and to the infant or crucified and
suffering Jesus, rather than to the figure of Jesus as regal and remote.
Other forms of devotional life took shape during the 12th, 13th, and
14th centuries. The Cistercian Order, for example, instituted the status
of lay brother, who was usually an adult layman who retired from the
world to undertake the management of monastic resources. Still other
members of the laity retired to the sequestered life of hermits and
recluses, usually under the supervision of a chaplain.
During the 13th and 14th centuries, devotional movements arose that
were neither monastic nor clerical in any other sense. The most notable
of these was the Beguines, an order of devout women (and occasionally,
but more rarely, men, who lived in all-male communities and were called
Beghards) who lived together in devotional communities within towns,
especially in the Low Countries and the Rhineland, followed no rule, and
took no vow. They worked in the towns but lived collectively and might
leave for marriage or another form of life at any time. Some of the most
important devotional literature of the period was written by and for
Beguines.
The vast movements of reform, ecclesiastical organization, and
pastoral care of the 12th and 13th centuries reached their greatest
intensity in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216). Lothar of
Segni, as he was originally known, was the son of a landholding noble
family outside Rome; he was educated in the schools of Paris and
attached to the Roman Curia in 1187. Innocent issued the strongest and
most tightly argued claims for papal authority, and he launched Crusades
and instituted the office of papal judge-delegate to combat clerical
crimes and heterodox belief. He also supported the new mendicant orders,
paid particular attention to the needs of popular devotion, reformed and
disciplined the Curia, and assembled the fourth Lateran Council in
November 1215. Innocent came as close to realizing the ideals of reform
and renewal in ecclesiological practice as any pope before or since.
The organization of normative religion, the formal rules and norms of
practice in the faith, was intended to give regularity and order to
lived religion. Daily religious life was characterized by the acceptance
of tradition and authority and by belief in the saints as patrons of
local communities and belief in the parish priest as a conveyor of grace
by virtue of his sacramental powers (conferred by ordination) and his
legal powers (conferred by the bishop). During the 12th century,
institutional structures for official acts of canonization were
established, but the enthusiasm for the saints remained an important
part of both popular devotion and the official cult of the saints (the
system of religious belief and ritual surrounding the saints). The cult
of the saints was celebrated by clergy and laity in the observance of
feast days and processions, the veneration of saints’ relics,
pilgrimages to saints’ shrines, and the rituals of death and burial near
the graves of saints. The liturgical dimension of pastoral care
regulated the major events of the day, week, season, and Christian year,
according to whose rhythms everyone lived. Priests blessed harvests,
animals, and ships and liturgically interceded in the face of natural or
man-made disasters.
Religious devotion strengthened the presence of normative religion in
marriage and the family, the sacred character of the local community and
the territorial monarchy, and the moral rules by which lay affairs were
conducted. The fourth Lateran Council largely institutionalized the work
of the 12th-century moral theologians at Paris, who had begun to apply
the principles of doctrine and canon law to the lives of their
contemporaries.
The Middle Ages » The consequences of reform » From persuasion to
coercion: The emergence of a new ecclesiastical discipline
The ecclesiastical reform movements that sharply distinguished clergy
from laity also developed a means of sustaining that distinction through
intensified ecclesiastical discipline. Clergy were not only freed from
most forms of subordination to laypersons but also were granted legal
privileges, being triable only in church courts and subject only to
penalties deemed suitable by church authorities (benefit of clergy).
Laity who injured clerical personnel or property were punished more
harshly. But the distinction between clergy and laity also enhanced lay
status. Lay authorities could legally perform judicial actions that were
forbidden to clergy, like the shedding of blood or other forms of
physical punishment. Clerical thinkers greatly legitimated lay
activities that earlier monastic Christianity had once scorned,
attributing a positive value to commerce, the law, just warfare,
marriage, and other roles once considered signs of fallen and weak human
nature.
The intensity of the reform movements led to a new and elaborated
idea of sin and to categories of sin so grave that they required the
harshest punishments, sometimes in cooperation with lay courts. The idea
of crime itself, drawing on both older Roman law and earlier
ecclesiastical discipline, gradually came to assume a distinctive place
in secular law, as more and more conflicts that had once been settled
privately came within the purview of lay legal officials. Clerical crime
became a major focus of disciplinary concern. The term heresy, loosely
used until the 11th century, slowly became better defined and was
initially applied to clerical misconduct such as simony (the acceptance
of ecclesiastical office from laymen) and nicolaitism (clerical
marriage). The increasingly precise exposition of Christian doctrine by
12th-century theologians seemed to many people a displacement of the
Christianity that they had always understood and practiced. Legal
collections began to treat various forms of doctrinal and devotional
dissent as heresy, thus formulating a category that would criminalize a
wide variety of beliefs and conduct.
Promoters of the new ecclesiastical doctrine and discipline believed
that the increasingly numerous devotional collectives and their
charismatic leaders would eventually threaten the order of both clerical
and lay society. In the early 13th century the English theologian Robert
Grosseteste formulated a definition that accurately reflected the
changed understanding of religious dissent: “Heresy is an opinion chosen
by human faculties, contrary to sacred scripture, openly taught, and
pertinaciously defended.” Criminal heresy involved belief that
contradicted orthodox doctrine and was arrived at by purely human
capacities. It was also belief that was publicly, and therefore
seditiously, proclaimed, even after legitimate instruction by authorized
teachers, thereby making the “heretic” contumacious in the eyes of the
law.
Like the problem of criminal clergy, the problem of heresy raised
procedural questions in law. Legal procedure in criminal cases might be
initiated by an accusation by a responsible individual or by a
denunciation by a group of specially appointed synodal witnesses. In
1199 Innocent III added a third procedure, that of inquisition, or
inquiry by an appropriate authority, which was first used to investigate
clerical crimes. Later popes appointed judges delegate as individual
inquisitors, although there was not an institutionalized office of
inquisition until the royal-papal establishment of the Spanish
Inquisition in 1478.
The Middle Ages » The consequences of reform » Christianity, Judaism,
and Islam
The sacred texts of revealed religions may be eternal and unchanging,
but they are understood and applied by human beings living in time.
Christians believed not only that the Jews had misunderstood Scripture,
thus justifying the Christian reinterpretation of Jewish Scripture, but
that all of Jewish Scripture had to be understood as containing only
partial truth. The whole truth was comprehensible only when Jewish
Scripture was interpreted correctly, in what Christians called a
“spiritual” rather than merely a “carnal” manner.
Although early Christian texts and later papal commands had
prohibited the persecution and forced conversion of Jews, these
doctrines were less carefully observed starting in the 11th century.
Heralded by a series of pogroms in both Europe and the Middle East
carried out in the course of the First Crusade, a deeper and more
widespread anti-Judaism came to characterize much of European history
after 1100. There also emerged in this period what some historians have
termed “chimeric” anti-Judaism, the conception of the Jew not only as
ignorant of spiritual truth and stubbornly resistant to Christian
preaching but as actively hostile to Christianity and guilty of ugly
crimes against it, such as the ritual murder of Christian children and
the desecration of the consecrated host of the mass. This form of
anti-Judaism resulted in massacres of Jews, usually at moments of high
social tension within Christian communities. One of the best documented
of these massacres took place at York, Eng., in 1190.
Before the 11th century the Jews faced little persecution, lived
among Christians, and even pursued the same occupations as Christians.
The Jews’ restricted status after that time encouraged many of them to
turn to moneylending, which only served to increase Christian hostility
(Christians were forbidden to lend money to other Christians). Because
the Jews often undertook on behalf of rulers work that Christians would
not do or were not encouraged to do, such as serving as physicians and
financial officers, Jews were hated both for their religion and for
their social roles.
Jewish identity was also visually marked. Jews were depicted in
particular ways in art, and the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 insisted
that Jews wear identifying marks on their clothing. Even when not
savagely persecuted, Jews were considered the property of the
territorial monarchs of Europe and could be routinely exploited
economically and even expelled, as they were from England in 1290,
France in 1306, and Spain in 1492.
Yet Christians also believed that it was necessary for the Jews to
continue to exist unconverted, because the Apocalypse, or Revelation to
John, the last book of the Christian Bible, stated that the Jews would
be converted at the end of time. Therefore, a “saving remnant” of Jews
needed to exist so that scriptural prophecy would be fulfilled.
Muslims, on the other hand, possessed neither the historical status
of Jews nor their place in salvation history (the course of events from
Creation to the Last Judgment). To many Christian thinkers, Muslims were
former Christian heretics who worshipped Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam,
and were guilty of occupying the Holy Land and threatening Christendom
with military force. The First Crusade had been launched to liberate the
Holy Land from Islamic rule, and later Crusades were undertaken to
defend the original conquest.
The Crusading movement failed for many reasons but mainly because the
material requirements for sustaining a military and political outpost so
far from the heartland of western Europe were not met. But as a
component of European culture, the Crusade ideal remained prominent,
even in the 15th and 16th centuries, when the powerful Ottoman Empire
indeed threatened to sweep over Mediterranean and southeastern Europe.
Not until the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699 was a stable frontier between
the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire established.
Contempt for Islam and fear of Muslim military power did not,
however, prevent a lively and expansive commercial and technological
transfer between the two civilizations or between them and the Byzantine
Empire. Commercial and intellectual exchanges between Islamic lands and
western Europe were considerable. Muslim maritime, agricultural, and
technological innovations, as well as much East Asian technology via the
Muslim world, made their way to western Europe in one of the largest
technology transfers in world history. What Europeans did not invent
they readily borrowed and adapted for their own use. Of the three great
civilizations of western Eurasia and North Africa, that of Christian
Europe began as the least developed in virtually all aspects of material
and intellectual culture, well behind the Islamic states and Byzantium.
By the end of the 13th century it had begun to pull even, and by the end
of the 15th century it had surpassed both. The late 15th-century voyages
of discovery were not something new but a more ambitious continuation of
the European interest in distant parts of the world.
The Middle Ages » From territorial principalities to territorial
monarchies
As a result of the Investiture Controversy of the late 11th and early
12th centuries, the office of emperor lost much of its religious
character and retained only a nominal universal preeminence over other
rulers, though several 12th- and 13th-century emperors reasserted their
authority on the basis of their interpretation of Roman law and
energetically applied their lordship and pursued their dynastic
interests in Germany and northern Italy. But the struggle over
investiture and the reform movement also legitimized all secular
authorities, partly on the grounds of their obligation to enforce
discipline. The most successful rulers of the 12th and 13th centuries
were, first, individual lords who created compact and more intensely
governed principalities and, second and most important and enduring,
kings who successfully asserted their authority over the princes, often
with princely cooperation. The monarchies of England, France,
León-Castile, Aragon, Scandinavia, Portugal, and elsewhere all acquired
their fundamental shape and character in the 12th century.
The Middle Ages » From territorial principalities to territorial
monarchies » The office and person of the king
By the 12th century, most European political thinkers agreed that
monarchy was the ideal form of governance, since it imitated on earth
the model set by God for the universe. It was also the form of
government of the ancient Hebrews, the Roman Empire, and the peoples who
succeeded Rome after the 4th century. For several centuries, some areas
had no monarch, but these were regarded as anomalies. Iceland (until its
absorption by Norway in 1262) was governed by an association of free men
and heads of households meeting in an annual assembly. Many
city-republics in northern Italy—especially Florence, Milan, Genoa,
Pisa, and Venice—were in effect independent from the 10th to the 16th
century, though they were nominally under the rule of the emperor.
Elsewhere in Europe, the prosperous and volatile cities of the Low
Countries frequently asserted considerable independence from the counts
of Flanders and the dukes of Brabant. In the 15th century the forest
cantons of Switzerland won effective independence from their episcopal
and lay masters. For the rest of Europe, however, monarchy was both a
theoretical norm and a factual reality.
Whereas kings were originally rulers of peoples, from the 11th
century they gradually became rulers of peoples in geographic
territories, and kingdoms came to designate both ruled peoples and the
lands they inhabited. Gradually, inventories of royal resources, royal
legislation, and the idea of borders and territorial maps became
components of territorial monarchies.
Kings acquired their thrones by inheritance, by election or
acclamation (as in the empire), or by conquest. The first two means were
considered the most legitimate, unless conquest was carried out at the
request or command of a legitimate authority, usually the pope. The
king’s position was confirmed by a coronation ceremony, which
acknowledged what royal blood claimed: a dynastic right to the throne,
borne by a family rather than a designated individual. Inheritance of
the throne might involve the successor’s being designated coruler while
the previous king still lived (as in France), designation by the will of
the predecessor, or simply agreement and acclamation by the most
important and powerful royal subjects. When dynasties died out in the
male line, the search for a ruler became more complicated; when they
died out in the male line and a woman succeeded, there were usually
intense debates about the legitimacy of female succession. Liturgical
anointing with consecrated oil was accompanied by the ceremonial
presentation to the king of objects with symbolic meaning (the crown,
the sword of justice, and the helmet, robe, and scepter), by the
chanting of prayers dedicated to rulership, and usually by an oath, in
which the king swore to protect the church, the weak, and the peace of
his kingdom, to administer justice, and to defend the kingdom against
its (and his) enemies.
From the very beginning of European history, kings had
responsibilities as well as rights and powers. Kings who were thought to
have violated their oaths might be considered tyrants or incompetents,
and a number of kings were deposed by local factions or papal command,
especially in the 13th and 14th centuries. Depositions also required
ceremonies that reversed the coronation liturgy.
The Middle Ages » From territorial principalities to territorial
monarchies » Instruments of royal governance
Kings ruled through their courts, which were gradually transformed from
private households into elaborate bureaucracies. Royal religious needs
were served by royal chapels—whose personnel often became bishops in the
kingdom—and by clerical chancellors, who were responsible for issuing
and sealing royal documents. Royal chanceries, financial offices, and
law courts became specialized institutions during the 12th century. They
recruited people of skill as well as of respectable birth, and they
established programs to ensure uniformity and norms of professional
competence, goals that were increasingly aided by the education offered
by the new universities.
In some circumstances, kings were expected to seek and follow the
advice of the most important men in their kingdoms, and these gatherings
were formalized after the 12th century. Kings also sometimes convened
larger assemblies of lower-ranking subjects in order to issue their
commands or urge approval of financial demands. As kings grew stronger
and their bureaucracies more articulated, their costs, particularly for
war, also increased. Greater financial needs often determined a king’s
use of representative institutions in order to gain widespread
acceptance of new direct or indirect taxation.
These assemblies developed differently in different kingdoms. In
England the first Parliaments were held in the late 13th century, though
they were not powerful institutions until the 16th century. In France
the Parlement developed into a royal law court, while the intermittent
meetings of the Estates-General (a representative assembly of the three
orders of society) served as an instrument of consultation and
communication for the kings. Across Europe these representative
assemblies were composed differently, functioned differently, and
possessed different degrees of influence on the ruler and the rest of
the kingdom. Their later role as essential and powerful components of
government began only in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The territorial monarchies represented something entirely new in
world history. Although they often borrowed from the political
literature of antiquity–—from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the Roman
statesman Cicero, and Roman epic poetry—they applied it to a very
different world, one whose ideas were shaped by courtiers, professors,
and canon lawyers as well as by political philosophers. Incorporating
both clergy and laity under vigorous royal dynasties, the kingdoms of
Europe grew out of the political experience of the papacy, the north
Italian city-republics, and their own internal development. By the 15th
century the territorial monarchies had laid the groundwork for the
modern state. When, to further their own interests, they began to
incorporate successively lower levels of society, they also laid the
groundwork for the nation. The combination of these, the nation-state,
became the characteristic form of the early modern European and Atlantic
polity.
The Middle Ages » From territorial principalities to territorial
monarchies » The three orders
In the 11th and 12th centuries thinkers argued that human society
consisted of three orders: those who fight, those who pray, and those
who labour. The structure of the second order, the clergy, was in place
by 1200 and remained intact until the religious reformations of the 16th
century. The very general category of those who labour (specifically,
those who were not knightly warriors or nobles) diversified rapidly
after the 11th century into the lively and energetic worlds of peasants,
skilled artisans, merchants, financiers, lay professionals, and
entrepreneurs, which together drove the European economy to its greatest
achievements. The first order, those who fight, was the rank of the
politically powerful, ambitious, and dangerous. Kings took pains to
ensure that it did not resist their authority.
The term noble was originally used to refer to members of kinship
groups whose names and heroic past were known, respected, and recognized
by others (though it was not usually used by members of such groups
themselves). Noble groups married into each other, recognizing the
importance of both the female and the male lines. Charlemagne used this
international nobility to rule his empire, and its descendants became
the nobility of the 11th and 12th centuries, though by then the
understanding of noble status had changed. During the 11th century,
however, some branches of these broad groups began to identify
themselves increasingly with the paternal line and based their identity
on their possession of a particular territory handed down from
generation to generation, forming patriarchal lineages whose
consciousness of themselves differed from that of their predecessors.
Titles such as count or duke were originally those of royal service and
might increase the prestige and wealth of a family but were not
originally essential to noble status. Nor were even kings thought to be
able to ennoble someone who was not noble by birth. As the status of the
free peasant population was diminished, freedom and unfreedom, as noted
above, gradually became the most significant social division (see above
Demographic and agricultural growth).
The new warrior order encompassed both great nobles and lesser
fighting men who depended upon the great nobles for support. This
assistance usually took the form of land or income drawn from the lord’s
resources, which could also bring the hope of social advancement, even
marriage into a lordly family. The acute need on the part of these
lower-ranking warriors was to distinguish themselves from peasants—hence
the relegation of all who were not warriors to the vague category of
those who labour.
Some nobles asserted their nobility by seizing territory, controlling
it and its inhabitants from a castle, surviving as local powers over
several generations, marrying well, achieving recognition from their
neighbours, and dispensing ecclesiastical patronage to nearby
monasteries. The greatest and wealthiest of the nobles controlled vast
areas of land, which they received by inheritance or through a grant
from the king. Some of them developed closely governed territorial
principalities which, in France, were eventually absorbed and
redistributed by the crown to members of the royal family or their
favourites. Despite the extreme diversity between knights, lesser
nobility, and greater nobility, their common warrior-culture, expressed
in the literature and ideology of chivalry, served as an effective
social bond, excluding all those who did not share it.
As the territorial monarchies gradually increased in both prestige
and power, the higher nobility adjusted by accepting more royal offices,
titles, and patronage, developing an elaborate vocabulary of noble
status, and restricting access to its ranks even though kings could now
ennoble whomever they chose. The culture of chivalry served the
ambitions of the lower-ranking nobility, but it also reflected the
spectrum of different levels of nobility, all subordinated to the ruler.
The culture and power of the European aristocracy lasted until the end
of the 18th century.
The Middle Ages » Crisis, recovery, and resilience: Did the Middle Ages
end?
Both ancient and modern historians have often conceived the existence of
civilizations and historical periods in terms of the biological stages
of human life: birth, development, maturity, and decay. Once the Middle
Ages was identified as a distinct historical period, historians in the
15th and 16th centuries began to describe it as enduring in a sequence
of stages from youthful vigour to maturity (in the 12th and 13th
centuries) and then sinking into old age (in the 14th and 15th
centuries). Much of the evidence used to support this view was based on
the series of apparently great disasters that struck Europe in the 14th
century: the Mongol invasions, the great famine of 1315, the Black Death
of 1348 and subsequent years, the financial collapse of the great
Italian banking houses in the early 14th century, and the vastly
increased costs and devastating effects of larger-scale warfare. For a
long time historians considered these disasters dramatic signs of the
end of an age, especially because they already believed that the
Renaissance had emerged following the collapse of medieval civilization.
Reconsideration of the Europe of the 14th and 15th centuries,
however, does not reveal decline or decay but rather a remarkable
resilience that enabled it to recover from disaster and reconstitute
itself by means of most of the same institutions it had possessed in
1300. Only from a highly selective and partial historical perspective
was there ever, as the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga once termed
it, a “waning,” “autumn,” or “end” of the Middle Ages.
The process of rural and urban expansion and development indeed
paused in the 14th century as famine, epidemic disease, intensified and
prolonged warfare, and financial collapse brought growth to a halt and
reduced the population for a time to about half of the 70 million people
who had inhabited Europe in 1300. But the resources that had created the
Europe of the 12th and 13th centuries survived these crises: first the
European countryside and then the cities were rapidly repopulated. It is
the resiliency of Europe, not its weakness, that explains the patterns
of recovery in the late 14th and 15th centuries. That recovery continued
through the 16th and 17th centuries.
The missionary mandate reached out across Mongol-dominated Asia as
far east as China, where a Christian bishop took up his seat in 1307.
The Mongol opening of Eurasia also relocated Europe in the minds of its
inhabitants. No longer were its edges simply its borders with the
Islamic world. Improved techniques in both navigation and marine
engineering led Europeans from the 13th century to cross and map first
their local seas, then the west African coasts, then the Atlantic and
Pacific. From the late 15th century Europe began to export itself once
more, as it once had to the north and east from the 10th to the 15th
century, this time over vast oceans and to continents that had been
unknown to the Greeks and Romans.
Neither the crises of the 14th century nor the voyages and
discoveries of the 15th suggest the end of a historical period or an
exhausted medieval Europe. The resilience and capacity for innovation of
14th- and 15th-century Europe, the hopeful, determined, and often
passionate search for salvation on the part of ordinary people leading
ordinary lives, even the inability of governments to weigh down their
subjects without fierce displays of resistance—all indicate the strength
of a European society and culture that men and women had shaped from the
8th century.
Edward Peters
