Chapter 15: The High Middle Ages

Introduction

Europe  developed the defining features of a civilization during the High Middle Ages (1000-1300) due to a variety of factors, including population growth, the exportation of violence, recovery of ancient texts, and the development of a market-based economy.  Situated between the Early Middle Ages and the Late Middle Ages, the High Middle Ages is sometimes referred to as the Central Middle Ages.  However, we are using the terminology of the High Middle Ages because the period included significant cultural developments that became integral to European civilization and its collective identity.  It was “high” in the sense of reaching an apex in population growth, socioeconomic evolution, and cultural expansion.  This chapter will focus on those features of Europe, while addressing significant political patterns in the Holy Roman Empire, England, and to a lesser degree, France.

During this period, the population likely tripled, the number and size of cities increased, trade networks became more reliable, and literacy spread as rulers sought the services of administrators, scribes, storytellers, and propagandists.  This proliferation of literacy was particularly important for the study of history, which relies on documents to make sense of the past.  As literacy increased, Europeans produced more documents.  Consequently, we have much more informed insights into the thoughts, behavior patterns, motivations, and objectives of Europe’s elites, who often oversaw document production.  Although we would very much like to know more about the less literate members of society, our written sources have remained heavily biased toward understanding Europe’s warrior aristocracy, Church leaders, and the scribes who worked for them.

These fundamental changes altered the economic and cultural landscape of Europe.  Rulers extended the lands under their control.  First and foremost, they successfully fended off invasions. In fact, they expanded the dominions of European culture by reconquering much of the Iberian peninsula from Muslims who had cultivated a vibrant culture there since the 700s; likewise, they uprooted Byzantine and Muslim control of southern Italy and Sicily.  They settled much of eastern Europe by campaigning against allegedly pagan Slavs, and they established colonies overseas, most notably in the crusader states in the Levant and on islands across the Mediterranean.  In short, during the High Middle Ages Europeans transformed from being the objects of invasions to being the invaders of other lands.  The areas controlled by Europeans were growing territorially and economically.

As these conquests proceeded, the peasants drained swamps, cleared forests, and brought more land under cultivation.  Agricultural production, population, and trade grew, as did tax revenues.  The Church and the secular rulers across Europe invested their growing wealth in the construction of elaborate Gothic cathedrals and sophisticated castles.  These undertakings enhanced the power and prestige of the elites, who became increasingly confident in divine support of their missions.  They hired legions of administrators, educated in a growing number of universities, where knowledge of Greco-Roman works became more widespread.

This increasing familiarity with the achievements and knowledge of the ancients arose, in part, from increased interaction with the Islamic and Byzantine civilizations to the south and to the east.  Some scholars traveled over the Pyrenees to access the highly literate Muslim culture of al-Andulus in the Iberian peninsula, while others traveled to and from Constantinople to bring copies of ancient works back to Latin Christian Europe.  Scholars introduced Aristotelian texts to universities and pursued the development of scholasticism.  The fundamental assumption of  scholastic discourse was that ancient authors, such as Aristotle, were worthy of serious study.  However, the ancients often contradicted each other, on a variety of topics including philosophy, astronomy, and their assessment of human nature, supposedly because they lacked the insights of Christian teachings.  Therefore, scholastics deemed it necessary and fruitful to apply logic and Christian wisdom to resolve these apparent contradictions.  Both Jews and Muslims had undertaken similar initiatives, based on their own religious orientations, in previous centuries.

European scholars had traveled to Muslim and Byzantine centers of learning since at least the mid-tenth century.  However, the rate of transmission of ancient writings increased during the eleventh and especially during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, partly as a byproduct of the establishment of crusader states in the Levant.  Even before the crusades, western Europeans had gained control of southern Italy, Sicily, and the northern half of the Iberian peninsula in the late 1000s.  As the fighting eventually abated, these conquests strengthened commercial and social interactions with Byzantines and Muslims.  Trade and diplomacy nourished cultural interaction, and the Latin Christian scholars expressed admiration for the intellectual abilities of their religious rivals: Eastern Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

Social interactions with the Muslims were especially beneficial for the Latin Christians partly because the territory under Islamic control spanned from the Iberian peninsula to India.  The enormity of this territory, with more landmass than the Roman Empire at its height, facilitated long-distance trade and the transmission of ideas, technologies, and social practices.  Sometimes these Islamic territories functioned as a conduit for the transmission of science, learning, and technology from China.  In some cases, such as the pointed arch and the construction of rounded towers, Europeans were more willing to accept Islamic technology and learning.  In others, however, Europeans rejected new ideas, as was the case with paper-making; Europeans refused to adopt paper for centuries, viewing it as inferior to animal skins (vellum) for book production.  In still other cases, we do not know precisely how much influence Islamic knowledge had on European practices.

One of the less understood cases involves Islamic knowledge of agricultural practices, agronomy.  During the High Middle Ages the Muslim understanding of crop rotation, irrigation, and the construction of pleasure gardens surpassed the most advanced practices in western Europe.  Although Muslims in al-Andalus introduced crops, including chickpeas, lentils, lemons, rice, and spinach, from India and as far away as China by the tenth century, many of these crops probably did not make their way north of the Pyrenees for centuries.  The Europeans’ distrust of Muslims combined with the conservatism of European peasants further inhibited the ready adoption of advanced agricultural practices beyond Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Portugal.  In addition, many Muslim texts about herbs, crops, irrigation, and soil remained in Arabic, untranslated into Latin until the thirteenth century or even later.  Knowledge of these advanced techniques traveled primarily through observation and through word of mouth.  Consequently, the Muslim agronomy diffused very slowly to the rest of Europe, over the course of several centuries, primarily from the Muslim-occupied Iberian peninsula.

Economic Growth

The economy of medieval Europe was pre-industrial; approximately 90% of all economic activity revolved around agriculture: the production of food and raw materials for clothing.  In such an economy, land was the primary means for generating wealth.  The lords of manors, both secular and ecclesiastical, extracted payments from residents on their lands.  Free peasants typically paid an annual rent to the lord who owned the land they occupied.  By contrast, serfs were often subject to a number of fees for the right to inherit the right to occupy land, for the lord’s permission to marry, and for a variety of seemingly random assessments called tallage.  This last sort of fee was particularly odious because lords often levied it at will.  In addition, lords routinely required both peasants and serfs to use the lord’s mill in order to profit from their need to mill grain.  In short, the wealth generation that occurred during the High Middle Ages accumulated mostly into the hands both of the warrior aristocracy and of the Church, both of whom were the lord of the manors.

In some principalities and kingdoms of Europe, the Church controlled over half of the land.  In other areas, the number was closer to 20%.  Still, the Church’s landholdings were substantial.  The Church also had other means for generating revenue.  A system of taxation, known as the tithe, extracted approximately 10% of the harvest every year from peasants who lived on the lands of the aristocracy.  Eventually monarchs also taxed the commoners, usually in the context of declaring wars.  However, the Church led the way in terms of devising an annual system for the extraction of Europe’s growing prosperity.

That prosperity was due to a combination of factors, including naturally occurring climate change, improvements in agricultural technology, and changing social practices.  The northern Atlantic climate underwent a warming trend that lasted from approximately 900 to 1300 CE.  Although the warming was nowhere near as pronounced as the climate change experienced globally in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it was enough to lengthen the growing season slightly in Northern Europe.  The warming lengthened the growing season and reduce the likelihood of crop failure.

The improvements in agricultural technology occurred slowly and unevenly.  Early medieval peasants had literally scratched away at the soil with light plows, usually drawn by oxen or donkeys.  These scratch plows resembled those used in ancient Rome: the weight of the plow was carried on a pole that went across the animal’s neck.  Thus, if the load was too heavy, the animal would suffocate.  In turn, that meant that only relatively soft soils could be farmed, limiting the amount of land that could be made arable.  Europe north of the Alps mostly had heavy soil with lots of clay.  The scratch plow did not work well there.

By 1100 a new kind of collar for horses and oxen became common across Europe.  It rested on the shoulders of the animal and thus allowed it to draw much heavier loads, enabling the use of heavier plows.  The Latin word for such plows was a carruca: a plow capable of digging deeply into the soil and turning it over, bringing air into the topsoil and refreshing its mineral and nutrient content.  We commonly refer to such plows as the moldboard or heavy-wheeled plow.  Simultaneously, iron horseshoes became increasingly common, which dramatically increased the ability of horses to pull heavier loads.  Further complementing these improvements was the widespread use of iron plowshares, the leading edge of the plow, which turned over the soil with greater efficiency.  Although individually these advancements were fairly minor, collectively they had a pronounced impact on agricultural productivity.

The heavy-wheeled plow was much more effective, especially in Europe north of the Alps, where the soil tended to have more humus and clay and less sand.  The plow was especially effective because it went deep into the soil, where the nutrients often were, and it also removed the weeds at the surface as the earlier plow had done.  The old scratch plow, which had been developed in the Mediterranean basin, where sandy soils predominated, was not really suitable for the heavy soils of northern Europe.  The heavier plow first appeared in China by about 200 BCE, and such plows were known in the Roman Empire.  However, it was not until the late tenth century that use of the heavy-wheeled plow became common in Europe.  The reasons for the slow adoption were manifold.  First, peasants tended to be very traditional.  A small change in agricultural practices could mean starvation if those practices proved unworkable.  In addition, peasant communities often required consensus because they worked their fields collectively.  Therefore, the adoption of a new type of plow was not an individual decision but a communal one.  Finally, the heavy-wheeled plow required a substantial investment in animal power because, as its name suggests, it was heavy; sometimes peasants needed as many as eight oxen to pull the plows.  Oxen were also expensive and often stubborn.

As knowledge of the selective breeding of animals improved, Europeans employed draft horses to pull the plows.  Two draft horses could pull the plow much more rapidly than four or eight oxen.  The draft horses were also more maneuverable and cooperative.  With a heavy-wheeled plow hitched up to two draft horses, a peasant could work more land with greater effect.

Another significant factor in the improvement of agricultural output was the adoption of crop rotation.  During the High Middle Ages some manors adopted the three-field system, which addressed the problem of nitrogen depletion caused by growing grain successively in one field.  Europeans had known about this problem for centuries and had often implemented the two-field system during the Early Middle Ages.  This system featured grain production in one field, while another field sat fallow, possibly with some livestock grazing.  However, the three-field system included a third field with a nitrogen-fixing crop, such as beans, peas or clover, planted in the Spring.  These crops absorbed nitrogen from the atmosphere and secreted it into the soil.  Once this Spring crop was harvested, usually in the late Summer, the livestock could graze that field and their manure further enriched the soil.  In a three-field system, the peasants then rotated the crops at the end of the manorial year, which occurred near Michaelmas at the end of September.

Because only a third, instead of half of the land, remained fallow compared to the two-field system, more land was productive at any given time.  The three-field system also increased the nitrogen content of the soil so that the yields of the grain harvest improved.  Whereas the yields in a two-field system could be as low as 2 to 1 or 4 to 1 pieces of grain per seed planted, yields in a three-field system were often two to five times higher than in the two-field system.  In addition, the three-field system could support more livestock because the three-field system often provided more nutritious feed for animals.  Consequently, Europeans ate more meat with the adoption of the three-field system.  The meat provided more iron in the diet, an added benefit for pregnant women, who suffered severe blood loss and sometimes mortality during childbirth.  For the first time in European history, women as a group started to outlive men, partly as a result of more iron in their diet.

Additionally, the conversion of grain into usable flour became more efficient as windmills and watermills populated much of the European countryside, especially north of the Alps.  The difference in speed between hand-grinding grain and using a mill was dramatic.  It could take most of a day to grind enough flour to bake bread for a family, but a mill could grind fifty pounds of grain in less than a half hour.  Although peasants resented having to pay for access to mills, typically controlled by the warrior aristocracy or the Church, the increase in productivity constituted a big attraction despite the exploitative nature of the mill fees.

Improvements in agricultural techniques, along with longer life expectancy for women, stimulated significant population growth in Europe during the High Middle Ages.  Between 1000 and 1300 Europe’s population more than tripled from approximately 30 million to approximately 100 million people.  Unfortunately, we do not have exact numbers as governments did not perform censuses.  However, manors often kept track of births and deaths, and births outnumbered deaths over the three-hundred year period.

Gradually, as agricultural productivity improved and as the European population grew, markets arose.  Many manors shifted away from a subsistence economy that featured the production of many crops, even those that did not thrive in certain climates and soils.   Peasants chose to plant those crops that grew most vivaciously on their land, relying on the burgeoning markets to supply them with goods that were not as likely to succeed on their plots.  Thus, specialization increased as a small but growing number of people relied on markets rather than trying to subsist only on what they could produce for themselves.  In short, markets enabled specialization which further enhanced productivity and the diversity of goods that were available.  Market towns and cities grew, although they remained small by modern standards.

Europe’s largest cities formed in Italy during the High Middle Ages.  Naples boasted at least 80,000 people by 1300.  Further north, Rome remained puny with only 10,000 inhabitants, compared to over a million in its imperial glory in the first century CE.  By contrast, Florence and Venice were lively merchant republics with well over 50,000 people at the end of the High Middle Ages.  The growth and independence of northern Italian mercantile city-states accelerated during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  Their development often involved violent uprisings against the traditional warrior aristocracy by merchants and laborers of lesser means and lower status, who established representative governments dominated by men of commerce instead of men at arms.  In the Late Middle Ages the republics of the northern Italian city-states became the breeding ground for the pronounced production of literary, artistic, architectural, and engineering achievements that historians refer to as the Italian Renaissance.

Because the Mediterranean had been an incubator of vibrant trade routes for millennia, the Italian city-states during the High Middle Ages had a distinct advantage.  They functioned as a point of entry for the importation of luxury goods from the eastern Mediterranean, which had been more urban, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated than most of Europe for millennia.  The importation of spices, porcelain, silk, and other luxury goods was particularly lucrative, and Genoa, Venice, and Florence became prominent centers of international trade by the 1200s.

North of the Alps, the situation differed substantially.  There were fewer cities, and they tended to be much smaller with less political independence.  Consequently, northern European merchants tended to be less powerful in relationship to the warrior aristocracy, who often demanded high taxes and tolls for commercial activities.  Nevertheless, merchants communities formed.  One such community arose in the Champagne region of France, where a series of towns took turns hosting trade fairs throughout the year between 1150 and 1300.  These fairs improved contacts between merchants in northern and southern Europe particularly in the cloth trade.

Also beginning in the 1100s, merchants in Lübeck, northern Germany (the Holy Roman Empire), increasingly organized into guilds.  This form of social organization strengthened their ability to negotiate some level of independence from noble taxation, and by the 1200s they established the rudiments of, what became known as, the Hanseatic League or Hansa.  They established a flotilla system that protected ships at sea from pirates, and they armed caravans on the land to protect against nobles who sought to exact fees from Hansa members.  However, as the Lübeck merchants gradually allied with guilds of merchants from other cities across the Baltic and North Seas, their ability to resist the depredations of the warrior aristocracy and pirates improved.  The Hansa developed a powerful presence from London to the Slavic republic of Novgorod in modern-day Russia.

Other types of guilds also arose across Europe during the 1100s.  Aside from the merchant guilds, which resembled a more localized version of the Hansa, craft guilds arose in various nascent industries.  Some guilds, such as goldsmiths and armourers, specialized in producing products for the nobility.  Others catered to a broader clientele.  For example, cloth production often involved many different specialized processes including carding, weaving, dying, and fulling.  The guilds ensured some level of standardization and quality in each of these manufacturing processes.  By the 1200s they had become ubiquitous in Europe, and they gradually ensconced themselves in the administration of most cities.  They enforced regulations related to the behavior of guild members, who essentially controlled economic activity in urban centers.  In addition to these economic functions, guilds also provided a sense of community and belonging for adult Christian males while excluding women, Jews, and foreigners.

The extension of lands under plow, the improvements in agricultural productivity, and the establishment of robust trade and production networks contributed to the growth of the economy of Europe during the High Middle Ages.  This growth did not bring prosperity to most Europeans, however.  The exactions wrought by landlords, the tithes collected by the Church, and the taxes levied by the secular rulers enriched those in positions of power.  The exploitation both of natural resources and of workers gained momentum for most of the period.  This exploitation enabled Europe to accrue the characteristics of an advanced civilization with beautiful cathedrals, fortified castles, and highly literate poets and administrators.  Those in power were successful in creating the impression that they deserved to profit from the labor of their subjects and believers.  They then invested their profits in acts of patronage to enhance their status and brand, as we will explore more fully when we address the Italian Renaissance in the Late Middle Ages.

The Rise of the Papacy

Although the Bishop of Rome had been one of the original five patriarchs of Christendom, the office was much more limited prior to 1000 than afterwards.  Occasionally popes, such as Gregory the Great (r. 590-604), who sent missionaries to convert the early English, and Leo III (r. 795-816), who crowned Charlemagne in 800, exerted bursts of papal authority and success.  However, the position of the Bishop of Rome was so contested by ruling families of the central Italian nobility that the extent of papal influence outside of the Italian peninsula was extremely limited before 1000 as powerful nobles appointed their own popes and declared others to be antipopes.  It was hard to claim wide ranging powers or divine approval when rival claimants to the office also boasted those same rights and powers.  Further exacerbating the impact of the internecine conflicts between Italian ruling families, the Christian morality of the individuals holding the office was often suspect at best.   The result was that the papacy prior to 1000 had a fraction of the power that it gained in the High Middle Ages.

The most influential catalyst for the reform and strengthening of the papacy was the monastic reform movement.  It started in Lorraine and in Burgundy during the 900s.  Over the course of the next two centuries it became one of the most disruptive movements in European history because it threatened to transfer enormous wealth and power away from aristocratic families and into the hand of the Church.  For the most part, it was successful in this endeavor until the 1500s, when many secular rulers confiscated monastic lands during the Protestant Reformation.  The essence of the movement was two-fold.

First, the warrior aristocracy (nobles) had long established monasteries for the salvation of their souls.  Monks in these family-controlled monasteries plied the Lord for mercy in order to atone for the atrocities committed by the founders of their monasteries.  The nobles treated these monasteries as familial property.  Members of noble families governed the monasteries and nunneries as abbots and abbesses.  The running of monasteries and nunneries provided younger sons and daughters of nobles with career paths that did not interfere with the family patrimony.  Instead of inheriting the family properties in the secular realm, the ecclesiastical aristocrats often busied themselves with the affairs of the Church and of local monasteries that the family controlled.

Second, in such an environment the dedication of the monks and nuns in these monasteries was suspect.  They rarely adhered to the tenants of Benedictine rule, including moderation, hard work, obedience, celibacy, and humility.  Instead, they drank, fornicated, and hired peasants to do their labor.  Occasionally, the Church leaders intervened and attempted to establish order.  However, without oversight and guidance from dedicated brethren, the monasteries suffered from bouts of moral decay and self indulgence.  Many monasteries were a blemish on the reputation of the Church as a source of moral authority.

Determined to reverse these lapses in the rule of St. Benedict, two different movements arose, one in Lorraine (the Holy Roman Empire) under Otto I (r. 962-973) and one at Cluny in Burgundy, under the control of Duke William the Pious of Aquitaine (r. 895-918).  The purpose of these movements was similar.  If the Church was to improve its influence among the powerful nobles, it had to improve its prestige.  Monks in these monasteries could no longer disregard their vows.  The proposed way to enforce such a program was to wrest the estates of the monasteries away from the noble families, who considered monastic lands to be part of their family patrimony.  While the movement at Lorraine demonstrated enormous scholarly dedication and devotion, Cluny became the dominant force in the monastic reform movement because it established a hierarchical structure that supervised the activities of monks in hundreds of monasteries by 1100.

Cluny’s mission to exert control over hundreds of monasteries and their enormous landholdings divided the European nobility.  Some nobles who believed in the aspirations and goals of the reformers supported it wholeheartedly.  Others who were threatened by the Church’s attempt to wrest control of lands held by their family for generations resisted reform vigorously and sometimes violently.  Because land was the source of most wealth, the reformers constituted a threat to the economic resources and privileges of many nobles.  Nevertheless, the movement was ultimately successful partly because monarchs often supported it.  It weakened the power of many of their nobles, but it also gradually increased the wealth, prestige, and power of the Latin Church and its leadership in Rome.

Reassured by the growing wealth and prestige of the Church, the reformist leaders of the Church cultivated powerful allies.  Among them was none other than the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry III (r. 1046-1056).  Henry exercised enormous control over members of the clergy in his territories, the very practice that monastic reform opposed.  However, Henry also recognized the advantages that a reformed Church could impart to emperors, such as himself, who typically received their coronation from the Bishop of Rome.  If the popes became more prestigious, the emperor would too, because the pope recognized his authority.  Similar to many monarchs after him, Henry sought to control the increasingly powerful Church leaders as a strategy to strengthen his claims to power.  However, during the High Middle Ages, secular leaders such as the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of England sometimes underestimated the growing power of the Church and its leaders.  And, as we will see in the following sections of this chapter, this competition for power between Church and secular leaders had fundamental effects on European political development.

When Henry III died in 1056, he left behind a six-year-old son, Henry IV (1050-1105).  During the young king’s minority, the leaders of the reform faction in the Church strengthened their control of the papacy and its independence from the Holy Roman Emperor.  They cultivated powerful allies to the south of Rome in 1059 when they concluded the Treaty of Melfi, which recognized the Normans’ claims to parts of southern Italy and Sicily.  The result was the removal of Byzantine and Muslim rulers in those regions.  Although relations with the Norman rulers in southern Italy were often strained, the papacy was becoming increasingly aware of the power of religious conviction to inspire men to go to war.

By the 1070s, the popes engaged in open conflict with the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV.  The conflict arose over a number of issues, including the right to appoint bishops.  This conflict, sometimes referred to as the Investiture Controversy or Investiture Contest also addressed the power of the Holy Roman Emperor in Italy and the pope in Germany.  It was part of a larger competition for power that spread across much of Europe for the next three-hundred years as popes and secular rulers sought to exert their control, not only over the appointment of Church officials, but also over the rights to collect taxes and to administer justice.  This competition for power grew out of the rising prestige of the papacy, which allowed popes to influence events well beyond the Italian peninsula, and it only intensified as a result of the crusading movement, which began near the end of the eleventh century.

The First Crusade, 1095-1099

Emboldened by the rising power and prestige of his office, Pope Urban II (r. 1088-1099) traveled across the Alps from Rome to Clermont, which lay in the heart of modern-day France.  Francia at this time (November 1095) was suffering from frequent bouts of chaos and violence.  Many knights wantonly disregarded any allegiance they may have had to an overlord.  They built wooden castles and considered land conferred to their ancestors by Frankish kings as their own.  Despite the attempts of ecclesiastical leaders to reform the Church and society, political authority had few moral obligations.  Might made right.  Violence disrupted commercial and cultural activities.

For over a century, since the late 900s, Church leaders had attempted to persuade members of the knightly class, who raided the countryside from their rudimentary castles, to recognize certain constraints on their behavior.  As described in the previous chapter, the Peace of God and the Truce of God arose as social movements, inspired by local clergy, to persuade knights to restrict their violence against non-combatants and to limit violence to certain time periods.  Neither movement was particularly successful.  Urban II understood that violence was endemic to much of Francia, and he addressed the topic in 1095 at Clermont, where he convened a council composed mostly of Church leaders.  There he noted the prevalence of violence and the need to correct local clergy who had made their services available to the corrupt local nobility.  He cautioned the clergy in attendance to care for their local congregations as a shepherd would for a flock.  He reminded them of the horrors of Hell for failure to take their clerical responsibilities seriously.

Urban II then asked his listeners to spread the news that the lands of the Romans, meaning the Byzantine Empire, had suffered invasions from people he deemed abominable.  He called all Christians who recognized his authority to save their brethren in the east.  Although relations between the papacy and the Byzantines were not particularly friendly in the late 1000s, he implored those in attendance to liberate eastern lands, including Byzantium and the Holy Land, from the control of the Seljuk Turks.  Several sources recorded the speech of the pope, and his precise motives for proclaiming the crusade have attracted the attention of numerous historians.

Whatever the pope’s motives, the crusade was a qualified success for the office of the papacy.  Clergy left the Council of Clermont in November 1095 and encouraged their flocks, their parishioners, and their neighbors to travel to the Holy Land to liberate Jerusalem from this alleged threat.  Although some preachers may have presented their quest to perpetuate violence against non-Christians in terms of protecting pilgrimages to the Holy Land, the pope’s speech was not so limited in its goals, and various preachers interpreted the pope’s exhortation differently.  The liberation of the the lands under Muslim rule constituted his primary talking point.  However, given the widespread dereliction of the Frankish knights who had failed to adhere to oaths to abide by the Peace and Truce of God, the pontiff understood the need for those warriors to save their souls.  He promised the cleansing of sins for those who undertook the journey to the Holy Land, including those who died before they arrived.

Although the papacy had framed warfare in religious terms in the past, the reaction to the Clermont speech and the subsequent preaching of the First Crusade was unprecedented.  Europeans responded in the tens of thousands; maybe as many as 50,000 crusaders heeded the message.  If so, it was the largest army in European history since the Romans and their allies met Attila the Hun and his allies at the Battle of Chalons in 451 CE.  Commoners and nobles left their families in Francia, the German Empire, southern Italy, England, and Flanders to join a growing pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  Before trekking across central and eastern Europe, a large number of them attacked Jewish communities along the Rhineland, most notably at Cologne and Mainz.  This anti-semitic response to the call for crusade highlighted the crusading rhetoric’s prmotion of violence, intolerance, and divisiveness.  It was not just the liberation of the Holy Land that the crusaders sought.  Encouraged by the rhetoric against non-Christians, the crusaders attacked Jewish communities who had inhabited the Rhineland and contributed to the growing culture and commerce of the area since the time of Charlemagne.

As the crusaders marched eastward through the recently-converted Christian Kingdom of Hungary they sparked fear among Christians and Jews.  Led by a charismatic preacher, Peter the Hermit, and some nobles, most notably Godfrey of Bouillon, who later became the first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, they caused panic and mayhem wherever they traveled.  The Christian Hungarians responded and massacred a few large bands of the disorganized crusaders.  By the time they reached Constantinople in late 1096, the crusaders constituted a threat to order and safety in the city.  The Byzantine emperor ferried them across the Bosphorus to Anatolia, where they met a swift and decisive defeat at the hands of the Seljuk Turks.  A few thousand of the survivors, including Peter and Godfrey, retreated in safety to Constantinope to await the arrival of more organized, professional warriors, mostly from southern Italy, France, and Flanders.  So ended the first wave of the First Crusade, sometimes referred to as the People’s Crusade.

It is safe to say that the People’s Crusade was not what Urban II had in mind in late 1095 when he proclaimed the crusade at Clermont, where he had met with Adhemar, Bishop of Le Puy, to plan the journey to Jerusalem.  The first wave of crusaders was disorganized and ineffective.  By contrast, after the pope appointed the bishop as his legate or representative, nobles and their retinues gathered under the leadership of Raymond, Count of Toulouse, one of the wealthiest and most powerful nobles in Adhemar’s diocese.  Other bands coalesced, principally among the Normans both in Sicily and in France and also under the leadership of the Count of Flanders.

In short, this second wave of the First Crusade, the Princes’ Crusade, consisted mostly of the type of warriors who had proven so disruptive to political stability in Francia for more than a century.  In late 1096 and early 1097 they traveled in separate clusters to Constantinople, where they swore to the Byzantine emperor oaths of loyalty, oaths that they would later forswear.  They often quarreled among themselves, but they maintained enough unity to capture Edessa and Antioch in 1098, and ultimately Jerusalem in 1099.  By 1102, they established a contiguous strip of Latin Christian territories that stretched from the Sinai Peninsula to Anatolia.  The leaders and their retinues were hardened warriors who had caught many of the Muslim inhabitants of the Holy Land completely unprepared for this type of religious-inspired violence.

Pope Urban II died two weeks after the capture of Jerusalem in July of 1099.  He never heard the news.  However, the office of the papacy benefitted mightily from the success of these bloody victories.  Over the coming century, the bishops of Rome became some of the most powerful leaders in Europe.  The First Crusade had demonstrated the popes’ ability to rally Europeans to their banner, to fight wars, to murder innocents, and to inspire their followers to undertake enormous personal and familial risks for the defense and extension of Latin Christendom.  The First Crusade also demonstrated the powerful response to the pope’s claim to remit sins.  The promise of facilitating entry to a blissful, eternal afterlife had enormous attraction.  In the coming centuries the papacy continued to dangle this carrot in front of Europeans when popes wanted to raise money to wage wars against political rivals and heretics.

Religious Enthusiasm

In addition to altering the balance of power between the papacy and secular rulers across Europe, the First Crusade also reinforced the collective identity of the Latin Church’s followers.  A shared sense of Christian values, history, and culture manifested in a variety of ways: the establishment of social organizations, the patronage of great literary and artistic works, the building of architecture, the development of theories related to religious doctrine, the persecution of non-Christians, and the waging of religious wars.  Oftentimes, the religious enthusiasm sparked by the success of the First Crusade and the rising prestige of the papacy encouraged the defining creative and intellectual works of the High Middle Ages.  On other occasions, the deep sense of devotion caused immense pain and suffering both for Christians and their adversaries, both real and imagined.

Crusading inspired Europeans to explore new ways to organize themselves into Christian communities.  Of course, they had been creating such communities since Jesus had gathered his apostles.  However, as the European economy expanded and the population developed more socioeconomic and cultural diversity, the types of Christian communities diversified to meet the needs of a more heterogeneous Europe.  In response, the papacy sought to control the proliferating modes of Christian association, lest they stray into heretical beliefs and practices.  Typically, these heresies arose in areas where trade enabled the dissemination of ideas.  Cities tended to house more diverse, literate, and cosmopolitan populations, and the emerging religious orders and movements of the High Middle Ages often addressed the various devotional needs of an increasingly urban and heterogeneous society.

The Mediterranean ports were one of the principal areas where these trends were in evidence.  The Templars and Hospitallers were military-religious orders that formed in the wake of the conquest of Jerusalem.  Their initial purposes were to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land and to protect the Holy Land itself.  By the end of the Third Crusade (1193), the Teutonic Knights formed as an order in the port city of Acre in the Levant, but like the Templars and Hospitallers, their sphere of operations shifted away from the Holy Land and toward Europe after the Crusader States collapsed during the 1200s.  The Templars became international bankers.  Their rivals, the Hospitallers, settled for political control of islands in the Mediterranean and eventually the Carribean, and the Teutonic Knights ruled over vast stretches of northern and eastern Europe near modern-day Poland.   All three of these military religious orders melded Christian practices, such as asceticism and celibacy, with knighthood in what St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) deemed a new form of chivalry.

In addition to these military orders, several ascetic Christian sects of monks formed.  Asceticism had always been one of the defining features of Christianity, and it became a prominent element of both orthodox and heretical Christian movements in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  One of the most prominent ascetic Christian movements of the early 1100s became known as the Cistercian order or the White Monks to differentiate them from the more traditional Benedictine order or Black Monks (discussed in previous chapter).  The White Monks practiced a more austere form of the Benedictine rule established around 600 by Gregory the Great.  They believed that the Black Monks had become lax in their observance of the rule.  The monastic reform movement of the tenth and eleventh centuries (described above) had intended to mitigate some of the lapses in the observance of the Benedictine rule.  However, the reforms gradually faded in many monasteries, including the mother house at Cluny.  During the First Crusade in 1098 a  group of monks, led by Robert of Molesme, left the Cluny abbey to found a new monastery dedicated to a more strict observance of the rule of St. Benedict.

The Cistercians initially settled in some swampland south of Dijon in Burgundy.  They drained the swamp, cleared trees, and turned wasteland into productive agriculture holdings.  This dedication to undertake hard work in a collective effort combined with their willingness to experiment with crop rotation and other innovative forms of agriculture sustained the order’s economic footing as it gradually expanded across Europe during the 1100s.  During the order’s heyday in the first half of the twelfth century the Cistericans attracted the most charismatic holy man in Europe: Bernard of Clairvaux.  Bernard became a powerful presence in the growth of the order and his name became legendary across Europe.  He prayed routinely to the Virgin Mary, a somewhat innovative form of devotion in Latin Christianity during the 1100s.  In addition to encouraging converts to the Knights Templar, Bernard was an austere ascetic and a mystic. These approaches to Christian devotion put him into conflict with Christians who sought to uncover the divine through the study of logic.

Shortly after the fall of the crusader state of Edessa at the end of 1144, Bernard began advocating for the Second Crusade (1047-1150).  In Burgundy Pope Eugene III (r.1145-1153) commissioned Bernard to preach the crusade in 1145.  The pope understood Bernard’s capacity to influence powerful people, such as the monarchs of France (Louis VII and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine) and the German imperial family (Conrad III and his nephew, Frederick Barbarossa).  The leadership of the Second Crusade differed markedly from the First Crusade, which had no monarchs.  The inclusion of monarchs should have been a boon to the crusading effort; however, the lack of coordination and cooperation between these rulers undermined the crusade’s success.  They ultimately failed to reclaim Edessa and Bernard, at one time the crusade’s most vocal proponent, ultimately characterized the Second Crusade as a humiliating defeat.

Edessa had been one of the first crusader states; however, its stability had always been dependent upon outside support.  Its conquest in 1144 under the leadership of Imad al-Din Zengi (r.1127-1146), commonly referred to as Zengi, signaled a rising unity among the disparate Muslim states in opposition to Christian control of the Levant.  The failure of the Latin Christian monarchs to retake Edessa encouraged the formation of a face-saving plan: the conquest of Damascus.  The plan was never particularly well thought out.  Damascus had opposed Zengi and his army.  The political situation in the Levant was more complicated than the crusaders realized.  Their siege of Damascus in 1148 was such a dismal failure that the crusade fell apart shortly afterwards.  The crusaders returned to Europe.

The Second Crusade’s only military success from a European perspective did not take place in the Levant.  Instead, it occurred on the Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula during the summer of 1147 when northern European ships headed for the Holy Land sought refuge from rough seas.  Landing in Porto, they came into contact with the first king of Portugal, Alfonso I (r. 1139-1185), who enlisted the military services of the crusaders by offering to let them plunder and despoil the city of Lisbon if they wrested it from the Muslims, who had held it for over 400 years.  Despite some infighting between the English and Flemish crusaders, they managed to force Lisbon to surrender in less than four months as the large population grew short of supplies.

These warrior Christians started their voyage as part of the Second Crusade but ended up as part of the reconquista, which had begun during the late 700s and would continue until 1492.  Although the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula had progressed slowly during the 800s and 900s, by the eleventh century Christian soldiers were rallying against al-Andulus, a collection of Muslim states that controlled the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula.  Unsurprisingly, Europeans found it much easier to conquer and hold land closer to their heartland, what became known as Continental Europe rather than in faraway territories, such as the Near East.

Despite or perhaps because of these religious conflicts, trade and intellectual exchanges between Europeans and Muslims increased during the twelfth century.  The Holy Land had long been a portal between Mediterranean commerce and trade routes, such as the Silk Road, from India and the Far East.  As such, the control of this area by Christians enhanced the profits of Italian merchants, who already had significant trade infrastructure in place before the crusades.  The influx of capital generated as a result of the crusades enriched Italian merchants who increasingly sent their children to study in universities, which originally appeared in the Italian peninsula during the eleventh century and spread to much of Europe by the thirteenth century.  Although modern universities in Europe are mostly secular, during the High Middle Ages they constituted religious communities, focused on the study of ancient authoritative texts in both the Christian and Greco-Roman traditions.

The success of the reconquista contributed significantly to the growth and development of these emerging educational institutions.  The Iberian peninsula had long been a center of learning admired by Christian monks.  Around 970 Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II (r. 999-1003), had studied Arabic texts and especially mathematics in Catalonia.  He used Arabic numerals and re-introduced the abacus to Europe.  His admiration for the learning and resources of the Kingdom of Cordoba inspired some to claim that he was in league with the Devil, while others recognized his intellectual leadership.

One hundred and fifty years later, by the end of the Second Crusade, the previously Muslim city of Toledo became the epicenter of an unprecedented translation effort.  Although some translations proceeded from Arabic to Castilian and then into Latin (the primary language of intellectual discourse in European universities), many followed a more direct route from Arabic to Latin.  The most productive of these translators was probably Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187), who translated over 80 books from Arabic into Latin.  Most of the books were of a scientific and mathematical nature.  In Toledo he rendered into Latin Ptolemy’s work on astronomy, the Almagest, which had originally been composed in Greek.  This work was virtually unknown in western Europe at the time, but it was well known in Constantinople.  This lack of cooperation between the Byzantines and the Latin Christians highlighted how poor relations were between Greek Orthodox Christians in Byzantium and Latin Christians.  Gerard also wrote original works on mathematics and algebra, and his writings eventually persuaded Latin Christians to adopt Arabic numerals.

The harvesting of knowledge from the Toledo libraries was not limited to astronomy and math.  Benedictine monks, traveling from Cluny and Italy, worked with local Mozarabs (Christians who spoke Arabic), Jews, and Muslims to render ancient and Islamic sources into the language of western European intellectuals: Latin.  They translated works covering Euclidean geometry, optics, medicine, ethics, physics, and logic.  The latter was especially relevant to the burgeoning form of intellectual activity in the Christian universities: scholasticism, a method of harmonizing apparent contradictions through logic.  It often addressed the verity of Christian belief through the application of logic.  When addressing the complicated topic of the Divine, both Muslims and Jews had developed similar approaches, such as the Kalām, the study of Islamic doctrine.

Some teachers in the scholastic tradition became intellectual celebrities.  The most controversial of these teachers in the twelfth century was Peter Abelard (1079–1142), a Parisien philosopher, poet, composer, and theologian.  He explored both the pros and cons of various important questions that had been considered by the Church fathers.  Abelard specialized in the application of reason to faith; he argued that ultimate truth could and should sustain reasoned investigation of its precepts.  By emphasizing the quest for truth even if it contradicted Church dogma, he fell afoul of the Church authorities, and especially of Bernard of Clairvaux, a powerful Church leader.  Abelard’s point was that educated Christians should challenge their own beliefs and try to understand them.  He advocated for reliance on the Bible as the ultimate source of truth in order to expand Christian knowledge throughout society.  Martin Luther would argue a similar point approximately 400 years later.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, both men fell afoul of Church authorities.

Medieval universities differed substantially from the modern institutions.  Typically, they resembled craft guilds, with organizations of apprentices (students) and masters (teachers) negotiating over the cost of classes and preventing unauthorized lecturers from stealing students.  Students often paid teachers directly, and there were no grades.  Teachers were generally members of the clergy, “professing” religion, hence the term “professor.”  A guild of students founded the first university, a law school at Bologna in northern Italy in 1088.  However, by the 1200s the Sorbonne in Paris became the most prestigious university in Europe, partly because of its emphasis on theology, which many considered the highest form of intellectual activity with its emphasis on studying the divine.  The University of Paris had emerged from the cathedral school of Notre Dame, where Abelard had taught in the 1100s.

Despite these differences from modern practices, medieval universities created a number of traditions that live on to the present in higher education.  They drew up a curriculum, established graduation requirements and exams, and conferred degrees.  The robes and distinctive hats of graduation ceremonies are directly descended from the medieval models.  The core disciplines, which date back to Roman times, were divided between the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic (called the trivium) and what might now be described as a more “technical” set of disciplines: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the quadrivium) – this division was the earliest version of a curriculum of “arts and sciences.”  Finally, the four kinds of doctorates, the PhD (doctor of philosophy), the JD (doctor of jurisprudence, that is to say of law), the ThD (doctor of theology, a priest), and the MD (doctor of medicine), are all derived from medieval degrees.

The overwhelming majority of students and professors were male, since the assumption was that the whole purpose of studies was to create better church officials.  However, in the thirteenth century Bettisia Gozzadini (1209–1261) became the first woman not only to receive a degree in a European university, but one of the first to teach at one as well.  Because of the highly patriarchal nature of medieval society, many of the great female thinkers of the period were either wealthy enough to hire a tutor or were nuns who had access to the often excellent education of the convents.  One outstanding example of a medieval woman who was known in her own lifetime as a towering intellectual figure was Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), abbess of a German convent.  While not formally educated in the scholastic tradition, Hildegard was nevertheless the author of several works of theological interpretation and medicine.  She was a musician and composer as well, writing music and musical plays performed by both nuns and laypeople.  She carried on a voluminous correspondence with other learned people during her lifetime and was eventually sainted by the Church.  Hildegard was exceptional in her range of intellectual production.  Medieval women faced enormous obstacles to their intellectual journeys.  Nevertheless, many other religious women, including Peter Abelard’s beloved Héloïse d’Argenteuil, also contributed significantly to medieval learning and scholarship.

The relative dearth of women’s contributions to the intellectual legacy if medieval Europe derived from the oppressively patriarchal structure of the society.  If a women was not in holy orders (i.e. a nun), then she was generally expected to marry and raise children.  Furthermore, in aristocratic circles, where women might have had the time and resources necessary for intellectual pursuits, families pressured their daughters to marry at an early age, often to men who were much older.  Among the aristocracy the average age for girls to marry was in the mid-teens, whereas young men did not marry until well into their twenties.  However, these averages obscure the great disparities in age that marked some marriages.  Writing in the mid to late 1100s (c. 1170s), Marie de France captured the gruesome situation that faced these child brides to much older men in her lays or stories, which often told of unhappy marriages between young women and their older husbands.  Marie’s stories, such as the tale of Yonec, recounted the almost sacred union of true love between an unnamed wife, locked in a tower by her older and apparently impotent husband, and a shape-shifting lover who flew into her tower and brought her delight in bed after receiving the Eucharist from a priest.  Although the penalties for women who committed adultery were likely very harsh, Marie’s work celebrated these adulterous unions as an escape from the loveless marriages that were apparently common among the aristocracy of Europe during the High Middle Ages.  In short, marriage often precluded any opportunity for women to pursue intellectual interests.  For that, a life of celibacy as a bride of Christ (i.e. a nun) was almost necessary.

Although the deep intellectual studies were not entirely new to Europe during the 1100s, scholasticism was becoming the most influential form of intellectual discourse in European universities, where it remained prevalent for more than 500 years.  Monks and clerics who attended universities applied scholastic, dialectical reasoning to questions related to the existence of God, access to the afterlife, the nature of divine justice, and many other topics related to Christian theology.  Although scholasticism eventually garnered a reputation for sterile debates (how many angels could dance on a pinhead?), it provided an avenue to innovation in religious devotion.  Scholastics pioneered the doctrines of Purgatory, which addressed the afterlife, and transubstantiation, which claimed miraculous powers for priests.  Both doctrines assumed a growing importance after the Church recognized them as canonical in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council.

To the medieval mind, a priest’s ability to transform a wheat wafer into the flesh of Jesus and ordinary wine into the blood of Jesus was nothing short of a miracle.  This doctrine claimed that the external appearance and taste of the wine and bread remained unchanged; however, the internal substance had, according

to the dogma, transformed.  Inspired by this doctrine celebrations arose across much of Europe during the early 1200s , and by the 1260s Corpus Christi Day had become part of the calendar of the Latin Church (as it still is).  Celebrated approximately six weeks after Easter, it provided an occasion for bishops to lead a large, orderly and hierarchical procession through the streets of cities.  They held the Eucharist up high for all to see in a device called a monstrance, typically protected by a canopy overhead.  Such rituals provided occasions for Christian communities to gather and demonstrate their devotion to a medieval doctrine, a powerful fiction that elevated the prestige of the clergy by claiming that they had supernatural powers.

By the Late Middle Ages most large cities of Europe had religious confraternities, guild-like, male social organizations, formed to support a variety of Christian teachings and customs, such as the feast of Corpus Christi.  They discussed the theology, planned the event, and ensured that the celebration remained orderly and respectful.  In the coming centuries, the Corpus Christi processions provided moments of tension when the doctrine came under increasing scrutiny by those who questioned the priests’ ability to perform such a miracle.  Nevertheless, the Corpus Christi celebrations reflected the depth and breadth of Christian devotion in the High and Late Middle Ages.  Performed across the Empire, Poland, Hungary, France, England, and the Mediterranean peninsulas, the celebrations expressed the growing devotion to Christian doctrines.

This devotion became an increasingly visible element of the European urban landscapes during the High Middle Ages.  Gothic cathedrals rose to new heights, dwarfing the earlier Romanesque churches.  Featuring the pointed fifth arch, web vaulting, and relatively thin pillars, they often showcased large stained glass windows full of Christian iconography.  On the exterior they relied on flying buttresses to offload some of the weight from the walls in order to accommodate the large windows.  They towered above the urban landscape and struck awe into the minds of newcomers to the cities.  For locals, they fostered a sense of civic and religious pride.

The intensification of religious devotion during the High Middle Ages assumed many forms from theological disputations to celebrations of Christian saints and doctrines to the formation of religious military orders, such as the Hospitallers, Templars, and Teutonic Knights.  Church leaders fanned the flames of devotion, which often had constructive consequences in terms of intellectual, social, and artistic development.  However, as the Church became more wealthy and powerful partly as a result of intensified devotion, it attracted the jealousy, fear, and even hostility of some secular leaders.  Its legions of well-educated clerics, administrators, and lawyers in addition to its ability to raise the largest armies in Europe put it in direct competition with emperors, kings, and princes who developed a wide spectrum of approaches to dealing with the ecclesiastical colossus.  This tension lasted into the Late Middle Ages even as the power of the Church began to wane during the 1300s.

To a certain degree, the Latin Church was a victim of its own success.  Religious enthusiasm was so intense that the Church could not control the beliefs and actions of the devout.  This tendency emerged clearly during the crusades when fervent Christians attacked Jewish communities during the First and Third Crusades.  The pogroms in the Rhineland in 1095 were led by preachers and minor nobles.  They villainized Jewish communities who sought shelter but ultimately suffered either at the hands of the crusaders or by committing mass suicide.  A similar pogrom occurred in York England in 1190 during the Third Crusade.

Although the Church officially condemned these horrific events, its leaders often encouraged anti-semitism.  At the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, Canon 68 stipulated that Jews must wear identifying clothing to prevent carnal relations with Christians.  The canon also demanded that they stay indoors during Easter because they failed to show deference to the Eucharist.  Church leaders had always been somewhat ambivalent about Jews, with some leaders appreciating Jewish scholarship and expertise and others claiming that they were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, even though crucifixion was a peculiarly Roman form of execution.  It was not just Church leaders who promoted these stories.  By the middle of the 1200s rumors spread that Jews were eating children and desecrating the Eucharist in private rituals.  These stories circulated across Europe for centuries.  By the thirteenth century secular leaders who had once relied on Jews for their skills in literacy, medicine, and trade, expelled them from their kingdoms.  This trend also continued into the Late Middle Ages.

This dark side of religious enthusiasm was not reserved solely for the persecution of Jews.  As the variety of Christian forms of devotion expanded during the 1100s and 1200s, the papacy responded by identifying some Christian groups as heretical.  The Christian practice of asceticism had inspired some Europeans to embrace a life devoted to apostolic poverty, living poor as Jesus and the Apostles did.  Their behavior differed markedly from the luxury that increasingly surrounded the papacy.  This contrast in approaches to Christian devotion divided the Latin Church.  For example, most mendicant friars, such as the Dominicans, the Carmelites, and most of the Franciscans, remained orthodox by maintaining a strict obedience to the papacy, even though they embraced apostolic poverty.  Other ascetic groups, such as the Waldensians and the Cathars, became the victims of persecution, because they threatened the authority of the Church leadership.

The Waldensian movement, begun by Peter Waldo in Lyon, advocated for the vernacular instead of Latin as the language of preaching and the Bible.  Waldensians questioned the emerging Church doctrines of transubstantiation and purgatory.  They rejected the Church’s claims on the sacred powers of holy water and relics.  In general, they doubted the ability of clergy to perform miracles.  The movement spread to the Holy Roman Empire and Italy by the 1200s.  Hauled before the medieval inquisition, Waldo recanted and went underground; despite his disappearance from the historical records, the movement continued to spread.  The Waldensian sect of Christianity later merged with Calvinist movement during the sixteenth century and survived into the modern period.  Some emigrated from Europe to the US.

By contrast, the Cathars were more openly defiant.  Their leaders called themselves “perfecti” and eschewed all physical contact with anything that copulated.  They formed a rival Church hierarchy in southern France.  In 1209, Pope Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) proclaimed a crusade against them that lasted 20 years.  Although the Cathar leaders and their followers considered themselves devout Christians, they questioned the holiness and authority of the Bishop of Rome.  They attracted members of the southern French nobility, including the Count of Toulouse and crusader heroes to their side, but ultimately they succumbed to the combined forces of the papacy and the King of France, Louis VIII (r. 1223-1226).

The line between heretic and orthodox Christian was not always clear.  Originating in the Low Countries and spreading into France and the Empire, beguines were lay women who embraced celibacy and apostolic poverty.  Unlike nuns, they could leave their religious life and enter into marriage if they chose.  They did not live under the guidance of a religious rule and did not have designated spiritual oversight from a priest.  This level of freedom for communities of religious women was very rare.  They never received a license from the pope, and they gradually attracted many critics.  By the Late Middle Ages they faced open hostility from Church authorities.  In 1310 the Inquisition sentenced Margueritte Puerette, a beguine mystic, to death by burning.  Although beguine communities continued to attract adherents well into the 1500s, their status vis-à-vis Church authorities remained more than uncomfortable.

Another group that skirted the lines between heresy and orthodoxy was the Spiritual Franciscans.  They emerged as devout adherents of the Franciscan order, which received papal recognition and blessing in 1210.  Francis himself became a religious celebrity.  He traveled on the Fifth Crusade and attempted to convert the Sultan of Egypt without success.  The Church recognized him as a saint less than two years after he died, an unusually short period of time for such an act.  In the coming decades Franciscans attracted the admiration of Christians across Europe for their devotion to apostolic poverty.  Many were also excellent preachers.  Ironically, the order became wealthy from pious bequests, and its members gradually splintered into two groups: the Coventuals accepted the growing wealth of the order and the wealth of the Church, while the Spirituals remained ardent proponents of apostolic poverty.  Some Spirituals embraced messianic prophecies and identified the pope as the antichrist.  Unsurprisingly, they gradually came into conflict with the papacy, and in the 1320s and 1330s Pope John XXII declared them heretics and ordered many of them imprisoned and burned.  A similar group of ardent Franciscans emerged in the 1400s.  Known as the Observants, they refrained from attacking the pope and continue to exist.

During the High Middle Ages the breadth and intensity of religious devotion was on full display.  Christianity proved to be malleable as an increasingly diverse population adapted the religion to its needs.  The crusades, the reconquista, international trade, the formation of guilds and cities, and the spread of literacy broadened the experiential and intellectual horizons of broad cross sections of society.  As these different groups sought to reconcile their faith with their experiences, Latin Christianity resembled a collection of religions 300 years before the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s.  Limiting the range of religious expression, the papacy sought to maintain a semblance of coherence and, more importantly, the recognition of its authority over religious expression.  It did not always succeed.

One of the clearest episodes of the papacy’s lack of control over its believers occurred during the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204).  Initially intended to be an expedition to attack Cairo, the seat of power over the Holy Land, the crusade changed course before it left port.  As most of the crusaders descended on Venice as the point of embarkation for the crusade, the Venetians demanded a contractually-agreed-upon compensation for transporting the crusaders across the Mediterranean.  When the crusaders were unable to pay the full amount owed, the blind, nonagenarian Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, forged a deal between the Venetians and the crusaders.  They invaded Venetian adversaries in the city of Zara, in modern-day Bosnia, where they installed a pro-Venetian government.  They then proceeded to attack another Christian city, Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire.

The pope, Innocent III, excommunicated the crusaders twice on the crusade, which never really materialized in Cairo because the crusaders became preoccupied with plundering Zara and especially Constantinople.  The pope eventually lifted the excommunications as he realized that the crusade had eliminated one of his main rivals for religious authority, the Patriarch of Constantinople.

Religious enthusiasm constituted a powerful force for shaping European culture.  It inspired great works of art, such as the paintings of Giotto (c. 1267-1337), the poetry of Dante (1265-1321), and the monumental architecture of the period: Gothic cathedrals.  It was such a powerful cultural force that it intoxicated the leaders of the Church, who claimed to represent God and to perform miracles.  However, power in Europe remained highly contested, fragmented, and contingent even by those who claimed to be the successors of Roman imperial rulers, the popes and the emperors.  In fact, the competition for power was one of the most powerful forces to shape European political and cultural development during the High Middle Ages.  Before we explore that topic, let us turn to one of the most powerful fictions to inspire European rulers to action.

The Quest for Empire

After the collapse of Carolingian power in the 800s, the intention to unite the remnants of the Frankish Empire persisted, especially in East Francia, which became the nucleus of what would later be called the “Holy Roman Empire” during the mid-1200s.  Rulers in this region maintained a vision of wielding power in disparate lands, from the northern parts of Germany and Poland on the Baltic Sea to central and even southern Italy and Sicily in the heart of the Mediterranean.  Inspired by the quest to reconstitute Roman imperial rule, this vision was mostly at odds with the ability of would-be emperors to exercise such power effectively, and it was typically contingent upon recognition by the pope.  Consequently, German kings often felt obliged to extend their power into the Italian peninsula in order to substantiate the impression that they were successors to Roman emperors and also to pressure popes to recognize their authority.  This ambitious paradigm for political control repeatedly undermined the German emperors’ control over their native lands north of the Alps; rebellions arose, and loyalties fractured as the strains of the imperial vision took their toll.  Consequently, those German rulers who claimed to be emperors frequently traveled with sizable armies to and from the Italian peninsula, where their presence was often, but not always, unwelcome.  In order to maintain a semblance of authority in such far-flung regions, the emperors often ceded much of their power to local rulers who feigned their loyalty.  Gradually, the Holy Roman Empire became a collection of semi-autonomous states that were nominally under imperial control.

The inability to control the empire effectively was in part due to dynastic instability.  Three different dynasties, Ottonians, Salians, and Hohenstaufens, ruled as emperors for most of the period from the mid-900s to the mid-1200s.  Because these German rulers were frequently at war, subduing uprisings across their dominions, they often died with child heirs, which hampered the orderly transfer of power.  In addition, as the bishops of Rome became more powerful by the mid-1000s due to the reform movement (described above), they often allied themselves with the emperors’ imperial rivals in order to preserve and extend their control over parts of the Italian peninsula from their power base in the Donation of Pepin or what became known as the Papal States.

After the death of the last Carolingian king, Louis the Child (r. 900-911), the German nobility established the procedure of electing its king.  This procedure attempted to resolve the problems inherent in dynastic kingship; the death of a king without a legitimate male heir provided opportunities for intrigue and even civil war.  Despite the attempt to overcome these problems, the elections did not solve the problem.  They provided occasions for bribery and political wrangling and invested the German nobles with significant power.  The electors typically consisted of the most influential nobles and churchmen in Germany.  They traditionally elected the designated heir of the previous emperor, but when an emperor died without a suitable male heir, complications and violence arose.

There was no Holy Roman Emperor from 924 to 962 when rival claimants vied for the title.  In 962 Pope John XII (r. 955-964) crowned Otto the Great (r. 962-973), who demonstrated both military and diplomatic acumen.  At the time of his coronation Otto had spent most of his reign wresting control of various regions of Germany from other families, defeating the pagan Magyars of Hungary at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, and exerting his claims to rule northern Italy after his coronation.  His son, Otto II (r. 967-983) proved to be less capable but very ambitious.  He attempted to extend imperial control into southern Italy, traditionally under Byzantine and Muslim rule.  Ultimately, Otto II failed to achieve his designs and died at the age of 28.  His successor, Otto III became king at age 3 and emperor at age 16.  During his minority in the 980s and 990s his mother and grandmother acted as capable regents, but Otto III died by age 21 in 1002 and left as his successor his Bavarian cousin, Henry II.  Henry spent 12 years gaining control of Germany and parts of modern-day Poland before making his way to Rome for an imperial coronation in 1014.

The Ottonian dynasty demonstrated the precarious position of the German emperors for the next 300 years.  They relied on the recognition not only of the German nobility, who elected them the kings of Germany, but also of the popes who crowned them as emperors.  Further complicating this challenge, the central Italian nobles had traditionally controlled the papacy, giving them power over the German kings as well.  These competing responsibilities required military expeditions across the Alps.  Despite the efforts of Otto I to revive learning and to build the sort of durable governmental structure that the English had achieved during the 900s, the territory that the Ottonians claimed to rule was much larger.  Consequently, the German kings had to practice the same sort of peripatetic kingship that Charlemagne undertook in the 700s and 800s, constantly travelling throughout their dominions suppressing rebellions.

A big part of this challenge involved control of the papacy.  Otto III sought to secure the allegiance of the pope by installing his cousin, Gregory V (r. 996-999), as the first German pope.  The Italian nobles, under the leadership of Crescentius II, would have none of it.  They elected John XVI as a rival pope, referred to as an “antipope” by those who did not accept the rival.  Otto had to return to Rome where he proceeded to cut off the nose, ears, and tongue of the rival pope before blinding and publicly humiliating him.  He restored his German relative as pope only to have him die under mysterious circumstances the next year.  He then appointed Gerbert of Aurillac, who became the first French pope in 999.

The transition to the next dynasty of German kings (r. 1024-1125), the Salians, was relatively smooth.  The German princes elected Conrad II shortly after the last Ottonian emperor, Henry II, died in 1024.  The system of electors seemed to be working.  The new emperor, Conrad II, took precautions to ensure the smooth transition of power to his son, Henry III, by appointing him as joint ruler of Germany at age 11 in 1028.  Although Henry III only lived to be 40, he successfully enhanced the prestige of the papacy by supporting the growing reform movement, which opposed the practice of simony, the purchase of  Church offices.   The papacy had suffered systemic corruption for centuries as nepotism and bribery had scuttled attempts to reform the office.  Additionally, multiple claimants fought for control of the Church and its growing resources (described above).  Perhaps the most conspicuous embodiment of these problems arose in the 1030s when Benedict IX (r. 1032-1044, 1045, 1047-1048) succeeded his uncle, John XIX (r. 1024-1032) at the age of 20, after his father bribed the papal electors.  He later sold the papacy and then reclaimed it.  In all, he held the papacy three times between 1032 and 1048.

The Roman people were weary of such corrupt leadership and welcomed Henry III when he removed three rival popes who claimed the office concurrently in 1046 and installed a reformer, who subsequently crowned him emperor.  Although the tenure of popes during this period was short due to the violence and chicanery surrounding the office, the emperor Henry III remained committed to reforming the papacy, even as he practiced simony.  Henry III apparently believed that the elevation of the prestige of the popes was essential to the growth and power of the office of the emperor.  He invested quite a bit of his reign trying to win Italian support for the German kings as rulers of the Italian peninsula, a quest that German monarchs continued to pursue well into the early modern period.

Following the death of Henry III in 1056, the papal reformers continued their rise to dominance as the young Henry IV and his regents sought to avert the crises that often accompanied the reign of a child king.  The regents supported the losing side in a civil war that erupted in Hungary.  They relinquished powerful positions within the empire in order to gain support from nobles.  Most importantly, the regents watched as their opponents among the Italian nobility gained control of the papacy.  The young Henry IV’s response was to appoint his own pope.  The presence of an antipope was not new, but it crippled Henry’s prestige as rival factions formed across the empire.  When Henry IV assumed direct personal rule at the age of 15 in 1065, he found himself in a very difficult position, with his nobles divided over loyalties to rival popes.  Although Henry improved his situation somewhat in Germany, the election of the Church firebrand reformer, Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII who ruled from 1073-1085) magnified a personal and institutional rivalry between the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope. This crisis persisted well beyond the lives of both Henry IV and Gregory VII.

The Investiture Conflict (1075-1122) was part of a longer and larger competition for power that spanned several centuries across much of Europe.  The central issue in the conflict was the right to appoint bishops in the Church.  For centuries, emperors and kings had exercised this right without much resistance from the papacy.  However, the reform movement in the Church called for the papacy to assert its right to appoint bishops.  The conflict brought the papacy into direct conflict with the German emperors; eventually, the larger competition for power extended to both France and England.  As the power and prestige of the Church grew, its ability to compete with local rulers for the loyalties of warriors and for the taxes of commoners increased as popes and bishops periodically clashed with monarchs across Europe on a variety of issues.  “Freedom of the Church” was a rallying cry that united powerful nobles against emperors and kings.  That freedom entailed the right to appoint bishops and archbishops.  It also meant the right to control Church assets, including not only the revenues generated from the Church’s vast landholdings but also those from tithes levied on tenants in secular estates.  Perhaps the most stringent assertion of the rights of the Church appeared in Gregory VII’s register around 1075.  Known as the Dictates of the Pope, the document claimed wide-ranging powers to control Church offices, to depose emperors, and to use the imperial seal, traditionally the exclusive right of emperors.

Eventually the popes relinquished some of these claims.  At the end of the Investiture Conflict in 1122, both parties compromised.  Civil war had destabilized the empire.  Much of Germany and northern Italy had divided into factions supporting either the papacy or the emperors.  By the mid-1100s, these factions assumed names in Italy where the divisions lingered.  Generally, the Guelph (or Guelf) faction supported the papal claims, and the Ghibellines supported the imperial aspirations of the Hohenstaufen dynasty.  However, the House of Welf, from which the Guelfs drew their name, were just a rival dynasty to the Hohenstaufens (Ghibellines).  The Welfs tended to support the papacy in its struggle with the Hohenstaufen, but in the late 1100s, the pope switched sides, abandoned the Welf Otto IV, and allied himself with the Hohenstaufen Frederick II (1194-1250) during his minority.  Otherwise, Guelph meant pro-papacy, and Ghibelline meant pro-emperor.

Frederick II was a talented and ambitious man, conversant in five languages.  Born in central Italy, he became King of the Romans at age 2, King of Sicily at age 3, King of Germany at age 18, Holy Roman Emperor at age 26, and King of Jerusalem at age 31.  However, his power weakened in all of these realms whenever he was absent.  He granted wide-ranging powers to German nobles in 1232 with the Statute in Favor of the Princes, which granted them the rights to control the administration of justice, to veto imperial legislation, and to strike their own coins.  Essentially, they were autonomous rulers.  Although Frederick attempted to reassert Christian control of the Holy Land in the late 1220s, his efforts garnered him the hatred of the nobles in the Holy Land and an excommunication from the pope.  He spent most of the remainder of his life trying to secure his control over Italy, which resulted not only in additional excommunications (following some brief lifting of the excommunications) by the pope but also the division of Italian cities and nobles into pro-papal and pro-imperial factions.

When Frederick II died in 1250, his son, Conrad, was unable to accede to the imperial title.  Frederick had so weakened the Hohenstaufen grip on power north of the Alps that a period known as the Great Interregnum emerged as foreigners, such as the King of Castile and the Earl of Cornwall, vied with members of the German nobility for the imperial title.  Although Rudolf of Habsburg (1218-1291) was elected King of the Romans in 1273, the pope never crowned him emperor.  His descendants, the Habsburgs, later emerged as a powerful dynasty who reasserted authority in the empire beginning in the 1400s.  Yet, imperial authority was severely crippled from the late 1200s until the mid-1400s.  In fact, the imperial vision remained unachievable.  Western and central European monarchs were never able to unite Italy and reproduce an empire that resembled the grandeur of ancient Rome.  Power remained much more localized across all of Europe.  Although the resuscitation of the Roman Empire enticed would-be emperors well into the early modern period, the power of local nobles and the princes of the Church fractured political authority as the competition for power remained intense, destructive, and creative throughout the High Middle Ages.

The Competition for Power: Dynastic Instability

Although the size of the Holy Roman Empire presented enormous challenges for the various rulers who claimed authority over its lengthy dominions, which crossed mountainous terrain, rival sources of authority and dynastic transitions presented equally formidable obstacles to the centralization and organization of political authority in Europe during the High Middle Ages.  To a certain extent these problems were inherent in the nature of hereditary monarchies that were contingent on the blessings of religious leaders.  Further exacerbating this destabilizing influence, the patrilineal view of legitimate royal power excluded female rulers and thereby decreased the likelihood of a smooth transition of power.  Agnatic kinship, based on male ancestry, weakened European monarchies by negating claims by women to rule in their own right and by questioning the right of women to confer legitimacy onto their sons and daughters.  It effectively reduced the number of legitimate heirs to the throne.

Dynastic continuity posed a common problem for all European monarchies, especially because women were generally not accepted as reigning monarchs in most states until the 1500s, and even then only in some places and with considerable challenges.  The perceived need to have a healthy, capable, adult, male heir who was ready to assume control of power upon his father’s death placed a serious limitation to the smooth transition of power.  This problem had plagued Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors.  It constituted a structural weakness in the patriarchal model of monarchical power.  In addition, the hereditary nature of medieval kingship was prone to problems because some heirs to the throne failed to understand the contingencies surrounding their power.  They disregarded the collective power of their nobles and of the Church.  They fell prey to the very rhetoric that was intended to convince their subjects that they had a divine sanctioned right to rule.  In fact, medieval kingship was based on a lie.  God did not favor one ruler over another.  Nevertheless, this fiction of divine sanction simultaneously reinforced their claims to authority and strengthened the influence of one of their most influential rivals: the Church.

Religious leaders have been in competition for power with secular leaders since the first dynasties emerged in Egypt and Sumeria.  Although medieval secular and ecclesiastical leaders often collaborated in order to maximize their wealth and power, personalities sometimes clashed, and objectives differed.  On other occasions, the balance of power between the two forms of authority shifted significantly, and this change inspired one side to repel the encroachment of the other.  Because hereditary kingship became more commonly accepted during the High Middle Ages than it had been in the Early Middle Ages, emperors, kings, and princes (secular rulers) came to wield power over vast territories when they were either disinclined or incapable of assuming such tireless work.  When the monarchy experienced a lapse in capable leadership, an opportunity arose for the Church to increase its power at the expense of  secular rulers.  Furthermore, as the Holy Roman Empire demonstrated in spades, nobles often sided with the Church against the monarchy or vice versa.  Consequently, even though political power was becoming more centralized, organized, and bureaucratic during the High Middle Ages, it still retained many of the disruptive tendencies that plagued political stability during the Early Middle Ages.

Although the kingdom of England had developed a highly organized governmental structure by the middle of the tenth century (see previous chapter), dynastic stability evaded the English chronically in the eleventh century.  Prior to the conquest of England by William of Normandy (a.k.a “the Conqueror” or “the Bastard”) between 1066 and 1070, the English had experienced at least three changes in dynastic rule: the House of Wessex fell to the Danish House of Knýtlinga in 1016; the Wessex dynasty then returned to power in 1043, only to slip into the hands of the House of Godwin in January 1066, nine months before William of Normandy established the Norman dynasty.  This reckoning is actually an understatement because it brushes aside the confusing events of 1014-1015 when the monarchy traded hands twice.

Aside from William I’s brutal determination to dominate his English subjects, he owed quite a bit of his success to the papacy.  Like Henry III of the empire, William of Normandy had allied himself with the moderate reformers in the Church, and Pope Alexander II gave him a papal banner and his ring in order to generate support among the Norman nobility for the conquest of England.  Subsequently, William virtually exterminated the native English nobility and replaced them with his Norman comrades in arms, who held land in both Normandy and Britain.  He also transplanted Norman clergy, including his half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, into positions of power in the newly conquered lands.  William ruled England with an iron fist. Near the end of his twenty-year reign in England William gradually fell out of favor with the more radical reform faction that gained control of the papacy under Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085).

This tension between the monarchy and the papacy only worsened during the reign of William II (r. 1086-1100), who aggravated and ignored the growing power of the Church.  When William I’s hand-picked Archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc, died in 1089, the hardline reformer and Abbot of Bec, Anselm, became the favored candidate of the Anglo-Norman clergy and Pope Urban II (also a firebrand reformer).  At first William II tried to oppose the appointment of Anselm.  He confiscated the lands of the vacant See (territories) of the Archbishop of Canterbury and publicly vowed to oppose Anselm’s accession to Canterbury.  However, as William II fell seriously ill and pondered his sins, he summoned Anselm to hear his confession and eventually agreed to Anselm’s appointment.  Relations between the king and prelate remained tense until a suspicious hunting accident put an end to William II’s life.  Because William II died without a male heir and because his older brother (never his father’s favorite), Robert Curthose, was out of the kingdom on his way back from the First Crusade, his younger brother and hunting companion, Henry I (r. 1100-1135), quickly secured the throne.

Henry I certainly encountered problems with the strident demands of the Church.  However, unlike his father and brother, he compromised and gained a reputation for dispensing justice.  Aware of the need to build a coalition of powerful supporters against the rival claims of his older brother, Robert Curthose, Henry I authored a coronation charter that guaranteed the freedom of the Church and specific rights of the nobility.  He eschewed the tyrannical practices of his predecessor (William II) and ruled for 35 years.   Victorious in war and adept at handling his political rivals, Henry I’s style of leadership differed markedly from the Conqueror, his father, and even more markedly from his brother and predecessor, William II.  He married a descendant of the House of Wessex (an ancient English lineage) and began the long process of healing divisions between the Norman aristocracy and the English subjects.

Despite cementing his authority, Henry I failed to ensure a smooth transition of power at the end of his reign.  Although it is easy to assign this failure to bad luck, the fragility of the patriarchal succession of hereditary monarchies in the period constituted the fundamental obstacle to the smooth transition of power.  His heir apparent, William Clito, had died at sea in 1120.  By 1126, nine years before he died, Henry I forced his nobles to swear an oath of allegiance to his daughter, Matilda, who had married the Holy Roman Emperor (Henry Vof the Salian dynasty) and acted as a powerful empress from 1114 to 1125.  Matilda not only faced the patriarchal and misogynistic opposition toward female overlordship that was characteristic of the period, but her father also arranged for her to re-marry after the emperor died.  She wed a longstanding rival of the Norman nobility, the count of Anjou.  In 1128 at the age of 27, Matilda married Geoffrey of Anjou, age 15.  Although Matilda was less than thrilled with the match, she pursued dynastic ambition as many noble women did during the Middle Ages.  By 1133 she had given birth to a son, Henry Plantagenet.  Twenty-one years later, he became Henry II, arguably the most capable monarch of England during the High Middle Ages.

Between the death of Henry I in 1135 and the accession of Henry II in 1154, England endured a dynastic struggle between Matilda and her cousin Stephen.  Often referred to as “the anarchy of Stephen,” the civil war between Matilda and her cousin divided the loyalties of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy.  Some nobles switched sides multiple times during the conflict as the balance of power shifted repeatedly.  Unlike Henry I before him, Stephen was unable to cement the loyalties of nobles, and he alienated several members of the Church hierarchy.  He demonstrated a proclivity for inviting nobles to court on the pretense of entertaining and rewarding them, only to imprison them and confiscate their castles.  Similar tactics gradually weakened his support among the clergy.

Between 1000 and 1160 the English witnessed five to seven dynastic changes, depending on how one counts.  Amazingly, the governmental structure remained intact during this period.  Nevertheless, the power of the crown waned as monarchs sought to legitimize their reigns by currying favor with the clergy and by granting protections to their nobles.  The rules of accession to hereditary monarchies were not fixed.  They were open to interpretation, and when a nobleman, such as Stephen I of England (r. 1135-1154), saw an opportunity to claim the throne with the support of the Church, the attraction was too strong to ignore.  Stephen succumbed to the allure of power.  Similarly, how could Henry I have resisted the throne in 1100 when his brother somehow ended up with an arrow in his heart while hunting?  One monastic scribe from the period claimed that it was God’s will that the archer made the mistake.  Both the transmission and the retention of power were tenuous in an age when the crown had powerful rivals.

The Competition for Power: Innovations in Governance

When Henry II began his 35-year reign in 1154, he and his very capable and engaging queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, ruled over most of western France in addition to England.  Over the coming decades, the couple expanded their influence by courting members of the French aristocracy, by creating an attractive court culture with troubadours and poets, and by gaining a reputation for justice.  Henry’s gradual formation of the common law system, featuring juries of presentment, returnable writs, traveling justices (justices in eyre), and the predictability of legal precedent established the foundation for one of the most influential and enduring legal systems in history.

Documented by his chief justice, Ranulf Glanvill, at the end of his reign in a treatise, simply called “Glanvill,” Henry’s legal system protected knights from the tyrannical practices of their lords.  Knights who lost their manors or rights that often accompanied those landholdings could seek a remedy in the king’s courts.  Because of the unreliability of ancient practices such as the ordeal and because of the corrupt justice offered by local lords, dissatisfaction with the legal system was widespread after the civil war (1135-1154), when rights to landholdings were often contested.  Meanwhile, the Church had established a relatively reliable and predictable legal system following the completion of Gratian’s Decretum, a Church legal code from the 1140s.  Because the Church claimed jurisdiction over the performance of sacraments in addition to matters of morality, its courts could address disputes related to marriage, inheritance, and the right to hold property.  Gratian’s Decretum reinforced the importance of documentary evidence to determine a legal judgement.  Compared to most secular courts at the time, this approach to the law became increasingly well received by many landholders.  Consequently, the Church’s reputation for dispensing justice grew across Europe by the mid 1100s.  Gradually, the Church claimed jurisdiction over cases that royal courts might otherwise adjudicate.  To maintain control over the administration of justice in his realm, Henry II felt he needed to respond to these perceived ecclesiastical encroachments on royal power.

In 1164, ten years into his reign, Henry enacted the Constitutions of Clarendon, which defined in detail the limits of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in his lands.  When disputes arose as to whether a case belonged in Church courts, the king would decide.  Henry limited the rights of the clergy to excommunicate his advisors, to leave the country without his permission, and to seek judgement from the papacy.  He recognized that his most formidable rival for power was the Latin Church and especially the bishop of Rome, il papa, the pope.  He thought he could limit the pope’s influence in his English dominions by appointing his trusted advisor and friend, Thomas Becket, to become Archbishop of Canterbury, at the time the highest religious office in England.  Unfortunately, Henry II underestimated Becket’s loyalty to the Church.  Once Becket assumed the office of archbishop, he wore a hairshirt (a form of punishment for his previous behavior) and opposed Henry’s attempts to control the Church in his realm.  The ensuing conflict pitted two strong-willed men against each other.  Neither was willing to compromise, as the issue was not only royal and ecclesiastical power, but also one of honor.  Ultimately, the conflict between Henry II and Becket led to Becket’s murder by some of Henry’s knights. Henry performed penance for Becket’s death, but whether the king actually ordered the assassination or not is debated even today.

Aside from these destructive elements of the competition for power, certain constructive elements arose.  Henry realized that if he was to compete with the Church for the loyalties of his subjects, he needed to devise a legal system that operated as effectively and reliably as the clergy’s rival system of canon law.  In 1166, when Becket was still alive, Henry promulgated the Assize of Clarendon.  Unlike the Constitutions of Clarendon, which delineated the boundaries between royal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, the assize spelled out the procedures for prosecuting serious crimes in royal courts.  It defined the processes for obtaining evidence from juries of inquest.  It empowered royal officials, such as sheriffs and traveling justices, to administer justice.  And, most importantly, it addressed the concerns of the landholding warriors, knights, who could lose their property at the hands of a tyrannical lord.  It required that Henry’s traveling judges rule according to established precedents, thereby imbuing the legal system with predictability and a modicum of rationality.

However, this system, known as the common law, only applied to members of the nobility when Henry II developed the system between the 1160s and the 1180s.  The common law especially benefited members of the lower nobility, knights, because it afforded them legal protections related to the possession of their land, the primary source of their wealth and privilege.  It was less popular with the upper nobility, the barons, who held land directly from the king.  If they had a problem with their feudal overlord, the king, the common law allowed them to seek a remedy in the king’s court, a decidedly biased venue to receive relief from a grasping king.  The barons’ frustration with the system boiled over in the decade leading up to the signing of Magna Carta (1215).

Despite the protests of the upper nobility, the common law had a profound impact on the prestige of the monarchy and the culture of England.  As the royal courts grew and became more sophisticated, the crown recruited literate administrators of the law.   By the thirteenth century, guild-like training clubs, known later as the Inns of Court, arose in London.  Young men, mostly from the lower nobility, sought instruction in the intricacies of the common law.  They read Glanvill and became conversant in the precedents and legal actions, writs, pertaining to various types of cases.  Thus, service to the crown by members of the knightly class expanded from the battlefield to the courts.

As the crown’s need for literate and loyal members of the knightly class increased, its patronage of tales, depicting knights as loyal and literate, emerged.  By the mid to late 1100s, precisely when the common law was in its genesis, chivalric tales increasingly portrayed a more sophisticated type of knight.  Whereas a century earlier chivalrous knights were primarily concerned with personal glory-seeking on the battlefield in a genre known as chansons de geste (or songs of deeds), the chivalrous knight depicted in the literature around 1180 increasingly projected courtliness, manners, literacy, and fair speech.  These knights sometimes read tales and expressed interest in securing justice for dispossessed landholders, especially heiresses.  They became models of behavior for the aristocracy as a whole, and for the emerging class of knightly jurists in particular.  Over the following centuries some members of the knightly class gradually gravitated toward a form of service to the crown that emphasized legal and administrative skills.  They evolved into a group sometimes called the gentry in England or noblesse de robe in France, a group of lesser nobles who differentiated themselves from commoners by adopting the very qualities portrayed in chivalric literature.  By the 1300s, monarchs across Europe actively promoted the cult of chivalry in order to instill courteous behavior and obedience into the warrior aristocracy.

Although this image of a chivalrous warrior was an attractive one, it was often a ruse.  As a patron of chivalric literature, Henry II nevertheless broke promises to his sons who had rebelled against him.  He imprisoned his wife, a very un-chivalrous act, for the last sixteen years of his life.  He claimed that he was going on crusade, collected taxes for it on three separate occasions, and always found an excuse to remain within his empire.  In short, he was neither particularly trustworthy toward men nor gracious toward women.  His actions were the antithesis of the chivalric ideal.  His successor, Richard I (r.1189-1199), was also a patron of troubadour poets and gained a reputation as a chivalrous warrior.  Richard, a leader of the Third Crusade (1189-1193), developed a relationship of mutual respect with his Muslim adversary, Saladin, who also embraced a code of ethics that resembled chivalry.  However, in contrast to the literary ideal of the courteous knight, Richard demonstrated open contempt for women.  He barred women from attending his coronation, and he apparently exhibited blatant sexual violence toward women on more than one occasion.  In contrast to chivalrous ideals of exhibiting courtesy and granting mercy, he ordered the execution of approximately 2,000 Muslims following the capture of Acre in August of 1191.  Just before his death in 1199 from a crossbow bolt shot by a young man, Richard granted the youth mercy but failed to ensure the lad’s safety; the boy was flayed alive before being hanged.  The graciousness of chivalry had a thin veneer.

Because Richard died without a male heir, the transition of power was somewhat contested.  His brother John (r. 1199-1216) was just as cruel and cunning as his father and brother had been.  He may have murdered Arthur of Brittany, his sixteen-year-old nephew and rival claimant to the throne of England, with his own hands as some sources claimed.  Regardless, rumors of John’s treachery, publicized by the French king, Philip II (Philip Augustus, r. 1190-1223), undermined loyalty to John among the Anglo-Norman and French nobility.  Some of John’s powerful vassals recognized the dangers that John posed, and they transferred their allegiance to Philip Augustus.  Over the following fifteen years, their instincts proved them right.  John displayed the hallmarks of tyranny and carries the legacy of tyrannical rule even today.

The Competition for Power: Opposition to Tyranny

In contrast to Henry I, 100 years earlier, John consistently alienated both the nobility and the Church.  Having lost most of his hereditary lands in France to Philip Augustus, he became desperate to raise enough money to compete with his powerful French rival.  He charged his English nobles excessive fees to inherit their property and expropriated the revenues of the See of Canterbury when Archbishop Hubert Walter died in 1205.   Although he won several military engagements in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, he consistently lost in France, where much greater potential for harvesting tax revenue existed.

As he depleted his treasury, John became increasingly desperate.  After escaping an assassination plot in 1212, he ceded England in 1213 to Pope Innocent III, a particularly capable pope, and pledged himself as the pope’s vassal.  He finally accepted Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury and levied a heavy tax on the kingdom in order to finance an invasion of his lost French lands.  It did not work.  After John attempted to lure Philip Augustus away from Paris with an incursion into southern France, his ally, Otto IV of Saxony, invaded France and lost to the formidable Philip Augustus at the Battle of Bouvines in July of 1214.

During the reign of King John, a trifecta of anti-monarchical forces aligned.  In contrast to the successful actions of Henry I a century earlier, John failed to account for his weak dynastic claim.  He then alienated the leadership of the Church by initially failing to accept the pope’s nominee for Archbishop of Canterbury.  He taxed and abused his barons, who were incapable of seeking remedies against the king in his own courts.  In addition to these three challenges, he suffered a series of military losses around 1204, when he lost most of his French territories, and in 1214, when he failed to retake them.  Faced with these setbacks, his northern barons, who had few interests in France, joined forces with the Londoners and their ally, Walter Fitzwalter, who styled himself “marshal of the Army of God.”  They confronted the king and his allies in a meadow called Runnymede on the western side of London, near modern-day Windsor Castle, where they forced him to sign an agreement, Magna Carta.

Magna Carta was essentially a peace treaty between John I and his opponents within the Church, among the nobility, and throughout the city of London.  As with many legal documents since the time of Aethelberht of Kent (c. 600), John guaranteed the rights of the Church in the first item of the Great Charter.  He then proceeded to restore the rights of the nobles on matters of inheritance, including the marriage of aristocratic widows, the supervision of wealthy minors (wardship), and the fees paid to the crown for inheritance.  Most importantly, the agreement guaranteed the rights of the barons to rebel against the king if he failed to abide by its provisions. It contained many items of long-term importance.  For example, it provided the foundation for what later became known as “due process of law.”  The king agreed to follow the judicial processes allowed to barons, as free men, and this provision applied to all the Crown’s male subjects by the mid-1300s and female subjects by the 1900s.  Finally, Magna Carta also imposed significant limits on taxation.  The king was obligated to seek “common counsel” before taxing his subjects.  This aspect of the charter later formed the basis for the establishment of parliament as the body that controlled taxation.

John’s reign underscored the fundamental weakness of most European monarchs.  On one hand, they often felt pressure to expand their dominions in order to have a ready supply of land to distribute to the military commanders, the nobles.  On the other hand, they struggled to maintain control of lands that were far from their base of power.  In John’s case, a capable rival, the King of France, took advantage of John’s inability to garner support among the French nobility.  And John’s losses in western France weakened his support among members of the Anglo-Norman nobility back in England.  Without the backing of many of his barons in England and with lukewarm support from members of the Church, John felt pressure to agree to the significant limitations to royal power laid out in Magna Carta.  He even had to acknowledge that his opponents had the right to rebel if he failed to live by the agreement.

Seven years later King Andrew II of Hungary consented to similar constraints on his power in the Golden Bull of 1222.  Similar agreements were signed by political leaders in the kingdom of Aragon (1205), southern France (1212), and the Holy Roman Empire (1220).  The long-term significance of these documents, and especially of Magna Carta, was that royal power was not absolute and that kings needed to build consensus among their most powerful subjects if they were to rule effectively.  Ironically, medieval kingship, as it evolved in the High Middle Ages, gradually laid the foundations for representative institutions, such as Parliament in England, the Estates General in France, the Imperial Diet in the Holy Roman Empire, and the Cortes in Spain.

Following the signing of Magna Carta in June 1215, John turned to the pope to annul the agreement.  Though he received the papal annulment, both John and the pope died the following year.  The barons took advantage of the minority of John’s son, Henry III (r. 1216-1272), who had just celebrated his ninth birthday, to modify and reissue the Magna Carta.  Once he reached the age of maturity, the nobles pressured Henry to reaffirm it.  A custom arose whereby the clergy read it aloud once a year in every parish in England.  Magna Carta became enshrined in the political culture of England, much like the Constitution in the United States would become some 600 years later.

Although Henry III enjoyed a long reign, it became increasingly tense in its final decades.  Henry apparently ignored two fundamental tasks that medieval kings faced.  His close-knit circle of nobles expected to receive royal gifts while ignoring the broader nobility, and like his father, he failed to win the expensive wars he waged.  While he placated the Church by investing in an extensive renovation of Westminster Abbey and by allying himself with the pope in a bid to conquer the Kingdom of Sicily, he angered many of his powerful barons by distributing lands and riches to his wife’s French relatives.  The opposition to this behavior reflected a growing sense among the Anglo-Norman nobility that they were culturally English rather than French; in other words, Henry’s French-speaking barons who lived in England were developing a disdain for Poitevin and Savoyard aristocrats from central and southern France.  This separation between the English and French nobles became increasingly pronounced in the following century.

Divisions also arose at court.  Henry III’s patronage of his foreign relatives from Poitou and Savoy, along with high taxes and war losses, ignited open opposition by 1258.  His brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort (from southern France), assumed leadership of the opposition to Henry’s policies. He compelled the king to sign the Provisions of Oxford (1258) in exchange for a grant of taxation.  Similar to the Magna Carta, the Provisions more explicitly ensured the barons’ involvement in reforming the government’s policies related to taxation and the distribution of royal favors.  Although the king signed the document, he later persuaded the pope to release him from honoring it, just as John had done a half-century earlier.  The barons rose in open revolt.  By 1264, they had captured and imprisoned the king.  Simon de Montfort acted as head of state and assembled what was arguably the first English Parliament in 1265.  Similar to previous councils convened by the Crown, the 1265 Parliament invited representatives of the barons, the clergy, and the knights.  However, with a nod to the growing wealth and power of merchants, the 1265 Parliament also included the election of two representatives from various boroughs across England.  Thirty years later, Henry’s successor Edward I (r. 1272-1307) convened a similarly organized parliament in order to win support for his expensive wars in Wales and Scotland.  Monarchs gradually recognized the need to seek accord among their nobles, partly to overcome the power of the Church.

The growth of a representative institution, Parliament, was not unique to England.  However, the power that Parliament assumed in the coming centuries differentiated the English institution from other representative bodies.  In France, for example, the Estates General did not gain the power to compose and ratify legislation.  The Imperial Diet had similar limitations.  Because the various kingdoms that became Spain did not unify until much later, its Cortes remained local in their provenance.  However, the persistent dynastic instability that plagued the English monarchy and the ability of the barons and the Church to curtail royal power gradually strengthened the authority of the English nobles and Parliament. By the early 1400s, King Henry IV ceded Parliament the power to control most taxation, and this representative body eventually became the de facto sovereign of England during the 1600s.

The Rise of France

In contrast to the English or the German monarchs, the Capetian kings of France ruled without dynastic interruption from the late 900s to the early 1300s.  Their successors, the Valois, occupied the French throne until 1589, when the Bourbon dynasty ascended to the throne, which they occupied for the next 200 years.  In other words, the French crown experienced fewer dynastic changes in 800 years than England did during the first half of the eleventh century.  This stability was only one of the factors that transformed the Kingdom of France from one of the weakest states in Europe at the beginning of the High Middle Ages to the most powerful kingdom in Europe by 1300.

In addition to their attention to dynastic stability, the French monarchs built a sense of collective identity and unity among their nobles while placating the Church.  Philip Augustus was the first of those kings to style himself King of France.  The assumption of this moniker only partially explains his seizure of so much territory from John of England.  Philip’s successors gained control of additional regions of France by arranging royal marriage alliances with noble families and by gaining territories controlled by so-called heretics.  Perhaps most impressively, the French kings promoted a series of fictions that elevated the prestige of the monarchy, including the claims that the French king could heal skin diseases through touch and that he was “the most Christian king.”  Eventually, these fictions found purchase with the Latin Church who recognized Louis IX (r. 1226-1272) as a saint in 1297.  By that time, the French monarchy had become the most powerful in Europe.

Unlike the far-flung territorial ambitions that weakened the monarchs of England and especially the Holy Roman Empire, the French kings focused mostly on solidifying their control over territories where they had long claimed authority.  Some of their more powerful vassals, such as the dukes of Normandy, who doubled as kings of England, had contested that authority.  As luck would have it, several capable rulers, including Louis VII (r. 1137-1180), Philip II (r. 1180-1223), Louis IX (1226-1270), and Philip IV (r. 1285-1314) occupied the French monarchy between the middle of the twelfth century until the early fourteenth century; their lengthy reigns, their determination to produce legitimate heirs, and the success in war bolstered the French monarchy near the end of the High Middle Ages.  They solidified control over most of their vassals while promoting the cult of chivalry and forging a sense of loyalty among their subjects.  They even gained control over the papacy by the early 1300s.  They laid the foundations for what became the most centralized and authoritarian monarchy in Europe.

High Medieval Civilization

Despite the success of the French monarchy in consolidating its control over the western territories, which had been part of the Frankish Empire in the Early Middle Ages but had fallen into the hands of the Angevin kings of England, political power in most of Europe remained highly localized through much of the High Middle Ages.  The Iberian peninsula consisted of a half-dozen different states.  The Italian peninsula had over a dozen.  The Holy Roman Empire was an assemblage of over 100. Even the most powerful monarchs, who ruled over England and France, had to rely on representative institutions and the Church to solidify their abilities to tax, administer justice, and collect taxes.  Similar to ancient Sumerian and Greek city-states, medieval Europe developed a civilization with numerous power bases.

These limitations and contingencies on political power persisted into the late medieval and early modern periods despite the quest for empire.  Europe certainly had monarchs who feigned and claimed absolute authority.  However, these claims were generally hollow.  Even the French monarchs learned to cooperate, to negotiate, and to forge alliances in order to maintain power.  Opposition to tyranny was deeply ingrained into the beliefs and practices of the Swiss, the Scots, the English, and the Flemish, to name a few.  As an international corporation with landed interests in every kingdom of Europe, the Church also contributed to the fragmentation of political power.  On the one hand, Church leaders sought political stability in order to maintain peace, commercial relations, the collection of tithes, and the construction of impressive cathedrals.  On the other hand, The Church’s enormous wealth was always a target for expropriation by overly powerful monarchs.  Threats of such appropriation grew during the Late Middle Ages and became fully realized in the Early Modern period.  However, during the High Middle Ages the Church remained a powerful counterbalance to tyrannical monarchical power.

Despite this tension, Church leaders often cooperated with monarchs over shared interests.  The construction of the first Gothic cathedral at St. Denis in France during the 1140s exemplified this convergence of interests.  Abbot Suger, an influential advisor both to Louis VI (r. 1108-1137) and to Louis VII (r. 1137-1180), supervised the building of an impressive monument, dedicated to God, the Church, and the monarch.  St. Denis was not only the final resting place of French monarchs but also an inspiration for future building projects.  Across most of northern Europe, Gothic cathedrals became a distinctive form of architecture that represented the intense religious devotion that characterized medieval Europe, and several monarchs patronized the construction of such impressive structures.

The convergence of interests that often nurtured relations between Church leaders and monarchs had gradually strengthened medieval kingship, which had been conspicuously weak throughout most of the Early Middle Ages.  Just as powerful religious sentiments could inspire learning in universities, the formation of religious orders, and the creation of works of art and literature, Christian devotion became intertwined with loyalty to the king in the form of rituals, such as anointing, coronation oaths, and royal funerals.  Similarly, Christian devotion also inspired horrific acts of violence against so-called heretics, Jews, and Muslims.  And it led Church leaders such as Thomas Becket and Stephen Langton to oppose unfettered royal power.  In short, the Latin Church proved to be a complex and powerful force in medieval culture and politics.  It frequently strengthened royal power, and sometimes curtailed it when it became a threat.

Part of that complexity revolved around the religion’s posture toward power.  According to the Bible, Jesus of Nazareth had scoffed at traditional authorities.  He famously cleared the Temple in Jerusalem of money-changers with a bullwhip and suffered execution by crucifixion for preaching against Roman authority.  In contrast to most ancient religions, which glorified the rulers, he claimed that God favored the poor and downtrodden.  Early Christianity included egalitarian ideas that were very much at odds with the hierarchical nature of authority in the Roman Empire, not the Republic.  However, as the Church transformed into the imperial religion, its leaders advocated a more hierarchical approach to authority that eventually strengthened medieval kingship.  By the High Middle Ages, the egalitarian elements of Christianity became subordinate to more stratified and rigid teachings.  Power-hungry popes purposefully kept vernacular translations of the Bible out of circulation.  Even preaching in the common tongue was contrary to Church practices.  A rigid hierarchy, headed by the bishop of Rome, sought to contain Christianity’s more subversive elements.

Consequently, by the end of the High Middle Ages, Europe had developed a very hierarchical and authoritarian culture, both in the secular and the ecclesiastical realm.  Guilds, vassalage, Church offices, processions, chivalric literature, and so many other features of this civilization promoted a hierarchical approach to humanity and even to nature and the cosmos.  Scholastics examined and promoted the Aristotelian vision of nature, which later became known as the Great Chain of Being.  This fiction provided a powerful justification for the authoritarian impulses of kings, popes, and emperors well into the Early Modern period.  However, a variety of forces, including the egalitarian elements of Christianity and the dramatic social changes introduced in the Late Middle Ages, kept Europeans from falling victim to the hazards associated with the rigidity and arid thinking that so often accompany hierarchy and deference to authority.  As we will see in the following chapter, European civilization gradually nurtured innovative forms of thinking and organization that challenged the often sterile and hollow claims to absolute authority.