A Short History of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Treaty of Europe (4 page)

The reason for its development was rooted in, amongst other things, a shift in the power base in Europe. The emergence of lordships and the building
of castles and fortified towns from the tenth century onwards reflected people’s growing distrust of the previously all-powerful central authority wielded by the kings and counts, as well as their fear that they were powerless to prevent incursions by the various invaders – Vikings, Magyars and Saracens – who were plaguing Europe. Castles sprang up on vantage points in strategic positions and,
together with fortified towns and villages, became centres of power – limited, in geographic scope, but manageable – to which people gravitated for security and to earn their keep.

Although it was not until the eleventh century that castles became the stone-walled, fortified keeps with turrets with which we are so familiar, they provided the hub for local people. The lords owned the land and
wielded complete authority over those who had sworn loyalty to them as well as over other free men. They had the right to gather taxes and wield judiciary power. They were in receipt of services from their vassals – effectively forced labour in the form of upkeep of the castle itself or work on the land. The vassals would also have to use the lord’s mill and his ovens, and at his price.

Although
feudalism arrived at different times across Europe the 50 years from 980 to 1030 can be looked upon as a period of feudal revolution. The role of the knight changed during this time. Until then, he was a violent provider of trouble and disorder. The Church changed this image, however, bringing an end to the relentless violence of the warlords. The knighthood was formalised, becoming a kind of
club to which admittance could only be gained following a ceremony or ritual conducted by religious officials. The knight’s weapons were blessed and he swore to defend the Church, the weak and the poor. Thus, by the end of the twelfth century, the knight had become an ideal figure, both ethically and religiously, and the concept of chivalry, with its connotations of courtly love, honour and virtue
had emerged as something to which to aspire.

The emergence of feudalism coincided with the beginning of a period of population growth. There were around 38 million people in Europe in the tenth century, rising to more than 75 million by the fourteenth. Better farming meant that more people could be supported. Therefore, there were more people to work. Apart from the
sheer number of workers, productivity was increased by a number of factors. Firstly, improved techniques in iron-working allowed better tools to be crafted and made available accessories such as parts for ploughs, horseshoes and nails. The invention of the heavy plough, pulled by horse, permitted the preparation of low-lying, more fertile land that had previously been impossible to plough. The
introduction of three-year crop rotation had a dramatic impact, reducing fallow land from 50 per cent of a holding to 30 per cent. It also became possible to cultivate spring crops such as oats. The availability of oats, in turn, allowed more efficient horse-breeding.

Carolingian Europe had been, in the main, heavily forested with groups of people living in communities separated by vast swathes
of unpopulated and undeveloped land. People lived off the resources of the forest, hunting, gathering or breeding pigs. Now, with so many people on hand, deforestation was possible. The open-field system became popular throughout the northern and central areas of the continent – each manor or village owned a number of large fields that were farmed in strips by individual families.

The farming
improvements led to a social and cultural revolution. People’s eating habits changed, as grain supplanted the food obtained from the forest. Land was reclaimed from forests and marshes to be cultivated and people began to move, extending the frontiers of Christendom. Large numbers of peasants emigrated from Germany and the Low Countries to the sparsely populated lands beyond the Elbe to the east
where there was freedom, villages were autonomous and, more importantly, rents were low.

The Church had become increasingly secular during the Carolingian period. The Emperor’s authority was derived directly from God and no one questioned his right to approve the appointment of bishops. Bishops wielded secular power, were involved in government and were
landowners through the benefices they received. Around 1030, there was agitation for reform within the Church, especially from the monasteries who saw priests and bishops becoming too involved in the temporal world and devoting insufficient time to the spiritual. Many priests did not adhere to the rule of celibacy, openly living with women, and many were guilty of simony – the ecclesiastical crime
of paying for holy offices or positions in the hierarchy of a church.

The great reformer, Gregory VII, became Pope in 1073 and immediately began to make waves. In 1075, he published the
Dictatus Papae
, a series of 27 axiomatic statements embodying the reform that he espoused. Critically, he stated that the pontiff had supreme legislative and judicial power within Christendom and, ‘That it may
be permitted to him to depose emperors’. Within a short time, he went a step further, excommunicating all secular rulers who made church appointments without reference to the ecclesiastical authority. It did not take a genius to see that a major conflict was about to erupt between Pope and Emperor over one simple question. Who was in charge?

Battle was soon joined. Emperor Henry IV, King of Germany
from 1053 and Holy Roman Emperor from 1084 until he was forced to abdicate in 1105, excommunicated the Pope and appointed an Antipope, Clement III. Gregory responded by excommunicating Henry and rebellious German princes elected a new Emperor, Rupert of Swabia. So, the Empire was now in the unhappy situation of having not only two Popes but also two Emperors. Henry, having been abandoned by
his supporters, decided that humility was the best way out of the crisis and, with great drama, turned up at the Pope’s court in Canossa, clad in the rags of a penitent and begging forgiveness. Of course, as soon as he had been forgiven and had returned to Germany, he renewed his plotting against the Pope.

The dispute rumbled on long after Henry IV and Gregory VII had left the stage, eventually
being brought to a fairly unsatisfactory conclusion with the Concordat of Worms in 1122. Pope Calixtus II (Pope 1119–24) and Emperor Henry V (ruled 1111–25) agreed that the elections of bishops and abbots in Germany were to be held in the Emperor’s presence so that he could mediate in the case of dispute. He was, however, disallowed from claiming payment for this service and was not permitted to
invest them with the ring and crozier, the two symbols of their spiritual power. The secular authority had been removed from the process of selecting Church officials.

The dispute would not go away entirely but there is little doubt that it represented a key moment in the development of Europe. According to one authority:

‘The investiture controversy had shattered the early-medieval equilibrium
and ended the interpenetration of
ecclesia
and
mundus
. Medieval kingship, which had been largely the creation of ecclesiastical ideals and personnel, was forced to develop new institutions and sanctions. The result during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries was the first instance of a secular bureaucratic state whose essential components appeared in the Anglo-Norman monarchy.’

(Norman
Cantor –
The Civilization of the Middle Ages
, ‘The Entrenchment of Secular Leadership’, p 395.)

While the reform movement had had the wind taken out of its sails, however, the increasingly hierarchical nature of the Church soon disillusioned many who began to make their own reforms. One of the results of this was an increase in what the Church called heresies.

The Crusades

By its very nature, the era of feudalism, with its fortified castles and villages, warrior knights and power-hungry lords, was a violent and bloody time. The Church had introduced the Peace and Truce of God, using spiritual sanctions to limit the violence that was endemic in Europe. This first real effort at civilising European society using non-violent
means was initially proclaimed in 989 and persisted in one form or another until the thirteenth century.

Pope Urban II (Pope 1088–99) conceived of another way to stop Christian killing Christian. He decided to direct the violence of European society on to another target – the Saracens. In November 1095, he crossed the Alps to give what has been described as one of the most important speeches
in European history, at the Council of Clermont, a synod of churchmen and laymen. He had called the synod to discuss a plea he had received from the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius I Komnenos (ruled 1081–1118), for military assistance against the new threat of the Seljuk Turks who were attacking Byzantium from the east.

The Turks had initially plundered the Arab world, taking first Baghdad and then,
in 1071, Jerusalem. The Turkish leader, Sultan Alp Arslan (ruled 1064–72), by then head of an empire stretching from the Oxus to the Tigris, was en route to Syria, when he decided to attack Byzantium. The Byzantine Emperor of the time, Romanos IV Diogenes, personally led out an army against the Turks but his force was routed at the Battle of Manzikert. Romanos was captured by Arslan and allowed
to go free but a crueller fate awaited him on his return to Constantinople where he was deposed, blinded and exiled.

Urban saw a great opportunity for the papacy in the Turkish threat. In reality, he had little interest in helping the Byzantines as success would merely benefit Byzantium. Instead, his focus was on gaining a victory that would ensure the Pope’s status as the true leader of Christendom.
Speaking from a throne raised on a dais below the church of Notre Dame du Port in Clermont, the Pope addressed a large crowd of bishops, knights and commoners. Robert the Monk recorded how he exhorted Europeans to take up arms and wrest the Holy Land from what he described as a ‘wicked race’:

… this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks,
is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds. Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the
Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves… God has conferred upon you above all nations great glory in arms. Accordingly undertake this journey for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Thus were the Crusades born, a series of invasions of various parts of the Holy Land, by different people
and countries and for different reasons, which continued until 1270.

Urban planned that the First Crusade would begin on the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August 1096. Such had been the power of his oratory, however, that a number of excursions to the Holy Land were undertaken in advance, the most notable – known as the People’s Crusade – led by a charismatic priest from Amiens
known as Peter the Hermit. 40,000 Crusaders, mainly untrained fighters and including many women and children, left for the Holy Land. The Turks massacred them when they got to Anatolia.

Later in 1096, the First Crusade proper left for Jerusalem, led by a mixture of French knights and Norman nobles, including Robert of Normandy, older brother of William II of England. This far
more organised venture enjoyed success. They took a number of cities such as Antioch and Edessa and eventually captured the biggest prize of all – Jerusalem – murdering just about every inhabitant, Muslim, Jew and even Christian. If the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius, thought the recaptured lands would be returned to him, he was to be disappointed. The Crusaders established four new Crusader states
in the territory they named ‘Outremer’ (Over the Sea). These were the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine (c. 1060–1100), became Jerusalem’s first ruler, although, rather modestly, he did not style himself ‘King’.

After the fall of the city of Edessa to the Turks in 1144,
Pope Eugene III (Pope 1145–53) commissioned the Cistercian abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux, to preach a Second Crusade (1145–47) to the Holy Land. It was a two-pronged attack. The Pope authorised one part of the force to take on the Moors who had occupied much of the Iberian Peninsula since around 710. This effort became part of the Reconquista, the recapture of the peninsula from the Moors that would
go on until 1492. It successfully attacked Lisbon and gained other territories from the occupying force.

Meanwhile, in the east, the Crusaders unaccountably ignored their original target of Edessa and proceeded to Jerusalem which was not actually under any threat. With 50,000 troops, they also launched an unsuccessful attack on the friendly city of Damascus. Things went from bad to worse. Nur
ad-Din, King of Mosul (ruled 1146–74), who had easily defeated the Crusaders at Damascus, conquered Syria. In 1149, he defeated and killed Raymond, Count of Antioch, one of the main Christian leaders in Outremer, sending his severed head to the Caliph of Baghdad as a present. Jerusalem would fall into Muslim hands again in 1187, when Sultan Saladin (ruled 1174–93) routed the Crusaders at the Battle
of Hattin.

With Saladin installed in Jerusalem, Henry II of England (ruled 1154–89) and Philip II of France (ruled 1180–1223) buried their differences and decided to launch another invasion of the Holy Land. Henry’s death meant that the new king, Richard I ‘The Lionheart’ (ruled 1189–99) was at the head of the English forces. The elderly Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I Barbarossa
(ruled 1155–90), added his massive army to the crusading force, but died before reaching the Holy Land, drowning in a river in southeastern Anatolia.