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The Central & High Middle Ages

Central Middle Ages: Around the year 1000, Europe was politically fragmented and its economy based on the manor system was barely functioning. However, changes occurred that showed that Western Europe was slowly coming out of its hibernation.

The first sign was demographic (that is, population) expansion: from the last quarter of the tenth century, the population of Europe began to grow rapidly. This growth in human capital would continue until the opening decades of the fourteenth century and corresponded with an extended period of warmer, milder climate in Western Europe.

Population growth immediately triggered other changes, first in agriculture. The need to feed more people led to land clearance: new fields were brought under cultivation by clearing forests and draining swamps. New villages arose. And population pressure also prompted innovations in agriculture. Europeans invented new heavier plows so that they could cultivate the heavier and more fertile soils of river valleys (as opposed to the lighter soil of the hillsides where agriculture was concentrated in the early Middle Ages). They experimented with new crops – such as beans and oats – and new patterns of crop rotation that left less acreage fallow. All these changes boosted agricultural productivity enormously, so much so that many scholars characterize these changes as an “agricultural revolution”. By the late eleventh century, not only could Europe feed an expanding population, but it could do so with less labor, freeing more people from farming to pursue other kinds of work.

Most of these people went to towns and cities. The revival of urban life in Western Europe was another clear sign of recovery and change. Cities in the early Middle Ages had hardly merited the name: their tiny populations lived as squatters amidst the ruins of ancient structures and they served mainly as centers of ecclesiastical administration. But in the eleventh century, not only did old cities revive, but their character changed – they became the centers of a new, more vibrant and expansive European economy. Trade and commerce expanded, at first locally, then regionally, and finally over long distances. The cities in northern Italy led the way: by the late eleventh century, their merchants were trading throughout the Mediterranean, exchanging raw materials and simple manufactures for the luxury products of the East (Byzantine & Muslim Empires), particularly spices and silks. This revival of long-distance trade was accompanied by the renewal of minting and widespread use of coinage; by the formation of merchant companies; by the creation of instruments of credit and ultimately the origins of banking and double-entry accounting. The rise in commerce also led to technological innovations:

faster cargo ships were designed, navigational maps improved, and the compass developed (extending the sailing season in the Mediterranean by several months). Expanding trade also led to the rise of lucrative manufactures – particularly the production of wool and linen cloth in the Low Countries and in Italy. This take- off of the European economy is called the “Commercial Revolution.” In sum, it marked the origins in the West of the kind of entrepreneurial capitalist economy that is still dominant today.

The growth of population also led to the expansion of papal power. The papacy had always claimed to have power over all Christians, and they had had their own state from the early Middle Ages. But from the eleventh century on, the popes developed not only a much more expansive view of the powers of their office, but they also developed a highly efficient bureaucracy and legal system to back up these new claims to authority. This development of papal monarchy was mainly driven by the desire for reform within the Church. Popes such as Gregory VII in the late eleventh century excommunicated emperors (Henry IV – Meeting @ Canossa) and raised armies against secular rulers in order to defend what religious people saw as the freedom of the Church. Pope Urban II’s calling of the First Crusade was another important sign of papal monarchy: here was a religious leader

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raising an army of conquest. Conceived as both a religious pilgrimage and a military expedition, the aim of the crusade was the recapture of Jerusalem which had long been under Muslim domination. In response to an obviously quite compelling sermon giving by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont, five armies left Western Europe in 1096 and headed overland toward Palestine. These forces were an unwieldy mix of experienced warriors and unarmed pilgrims; many of the poorest and least prepared for the journey died in route or were massacred as soon as they crossed into hostile territory. Amazingly, these motley armies actually managed to capture the city of Jerusalem in 1099 and they established four crusader territories in the east: the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch, and the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli. These first European colonies abroad had a fascinating, if brief, history. They served as profitable trading outposts for European merchants and they attracted some land-hungry European colonists. Like later European colonial ventures, they antagonized the local non-Christian populations of the regions. Within a century Islamic forces, rallied by the charismatic warrior Saladin, reduced the crusader colonies to a few cities on the coast.

Indeed, as the papacy was developing its power, so too were secular rulers in medieval Europe. Over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the kings of England and France were particularly successful at building strong,

centralized, institutions of governance. This was a striking development because, as you will remember, the power of kings had been crippled during the invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries. During those invasions, local knights who could organize some defense against Viking raids became petty-kings: they built castles, and by offering protection to local populations, they extended their powers and ruled their small territories. When the invasions ceased, these local rulers started fighting with one another to increase their power.

The Anglo-Saxons, largely because of pressure from the Vikings, had built one of the strongest states in Western Europe by 1000 C.E. However, the Anglo Saxons could never quite escape the Vikings. A Danish king, Canute, took over and ruled England in the early part of the eleventh century. And in 1066, William of Normandy, a descendant of Hrolf the Walker, the Viking chief who became the first duke of Normandy in 911 C.E., landed in England to claim the English crown.

The Normans, as the Viking descendants who ruled Normandy were called, had stopped their raiding lifestyle, settled down, and built one of the strongest and best run feudal principalities in Europe. However, their most long-lasting accomplishments took place in England.

In December 1065, the Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, whose excessive religiousness (piety) is said to have prevented him from producing any heirs to the throne, died. William, Duke of Normandy, had a legitimate claim to the throne as Edward's cousin, but the Saxon nobles chose Harold of Wessex instead. For William, there was only one response: take the crown by force. He gathered an army of some 5000 knights and infantry, promising his followers land in England. He also was armed with a papal blessing and banner, partly because of the Norman dukes' policy of liberally endowing the Church with lands and partly because the Pope wanted to bring the somewhat independent Saxon clergy more into line with current Catholic practices.

The Battle of Hastings (10/14/1066) pitted mounted medieval knights against the Saxon infantry drawn up in a shield wall on the crest of a ridge. Frontal assaults by Norman knights, infantry, and archers could not make a dent in the shield wall. Norman trickery could. Feigning retreat, the Norman knights drew groups of Saxons out of formation, surrounded them, and wiped them out. Being weakened several times by this tactic, the Saxon army then came under a barrage of arrows and one final charge of Norman cavalry that won the day. This gave William the crown and the title "the Conqueror", which was much more appealing than his previous nickname

"the Bastard". Never since has England fallen to foreign conquest.

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Much more remarkable than William's victory was how he consolidated it through a combination of feudal practices from the continent and old Saxon customs. While he owed his followers land, William also wanted to keep them from getting too powerful. The solution was to give the nobles lands, but scatter them over England so that they could not gather power in one area as a threat to the king. There were exceptions to this, notably on the frontiers bordering Scotland and Wales where power needed to be concentrated for defense. William also took about 20% of England's land for himself, showing that it was still a primary source of power. He demanded a large feudal army totaling 5000 knights from the 180 barons to whom he had given land, which forced them to give up much of their lands to meet this quota. The Normans also built some 500 castles in England between 1066 and 1100 AD, to guard against native uprisings as well as foreign invasions.

The two centuries after William I’s reign (1066-1087) saw the growth in the power and sophistication of royal government. At the same time, various Saxon democratic practices reasserted themselves and became an important part of the Anglo-American tradition of democracy. There was a constant struggle during this period between kings and their barons over their respective rights and obligations. In times of weak kings, the nobles won the upper hand. However, most of England's kings were strong and able to extend royal power.

Henry I (1100-35) started a more efficient treasury system, thanks to the introduction of Arabic numerals and the exchequer, named after the checkered table cloth they used to organize the king's money in rows. The court system also saw advances, with the king adopting the Anglo-Saxon belief that such personal crimes as murder, rape, and arson were also crimes against the king and state. Henry used this principle to send his justices throughout the land to try such cases.

After the feudal anarchy and civil wars during the reign of the weak Stephen I (1135-55), Henry II (1155-89), one of England's greatest monarchs came to the throne. As a feudal ruler, Henry still had to deal with the privileges and obligations of his noble vassals. However, as king, he claimed certain special rights and privileges to increase his power. Some of Henry's greatest accomplishments were in his legal reforms. Previously, private citizens had to bring charges against criminals, who often prevented such proceedings by intimidating their victims. Even without intimidation, few people wanted to risk bringing cases to court, because they had to pay a severe penalty (talion) if they lost. Henry changed that by having the state, not private individuals, bring suspects to trial. He also established grand juries whose duty was to gather evidence and submit the names of any likely suspects of crimes. Failure to do this resulted in heavy fines. As a result, more cases were brought to trial, a greater degree of law and order was established, and the king made money from the increased court revenues.

The concept of state prosecution of criminals and fact-finding grand juries is still a major part of our legal system going back to Henry II. Ironically, suspects brought to trial demonstrated their guilt or innocence through ordeals, such as by water. However, even if a suspect passed the ordeal but he was still suspected of the crime, the king might exile him from England.

Henry II is also remembered for his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose lands gave him control over one- third of France. However, the Angevin empire, as it is called, was more trouble than it was worth, since Philip II of France, technically Henry’s overlord for his French lands though he was much weaker than the English king, was always trying to stir up trouble and revolts. However, Henry and his older son Richard I, known as “the Lionhearted” (1189-99) for his exploits in the Crusades, held their own against Philip.

Unfortunately, Henry’s younger son, John I (1199-1216), was not. John got into trouble on a number of

accounts: losing a quarrel with the Pope, overtaxing England for his war against Philip, and then losing that war.

All these problems led to a revolt of the English barons who forced John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. Based

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largely on Henry I’s charter a century earlier, this was basically a feudal document, but it put forth the principles that not even the king was above the law and that no free man could be arrested without due process of law and a trial by his peers. This idea of due process of law is still a vital part of our legal system today.

Henry II’s grandson, Edward I (1272-1304), is remembered for his governmental reforms, and especially the evolution of Parliament. Originally, this was any meeting of the king and his vassals or subjects to talk (parley), usually over taxes. Since negotiating taxes with each town and shire was cumbersome, Edward called the Model Parliament in 1295. This body consisted of representatives from all three estates. Although later parliaments did not necessarily contain all these elements, in time it came to be the rule that all three estates should be

represented.

Parliament became especially important in England for a couple reasons. First of all, England being an island enhanced its trade and the status of the middle class. As a result, the middle class merchants and lower nobility (gentry) were thrown together in the House of Commons. In time, their common interests led to a powerful combination capable of challenging royal power. Secondly, since England was an island, it faced few invasions, giving little need for heavy taxes to pay for expensive armies. This, in turn, left English kings relatively weak, so that, by the 1600's, Parliament would have both the power and the constitutional right (or so it thought) to usurp much of the king's authority and lay the foundations of modern democracy.

In France, after the Carolingian line of kings died out during the invasions, a new dynasty arose. Hugh Capet (r.

987-996) founded the line of kings -- called, from his name “Capet”, the Capetians -- that would rule France into the late Middle Ages. But Hugh and his immediate successors in the eleventh century were kings more in name than in fact: they had the title of king, but they really controlled only their family lands around Paris. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, the Capetian kings slowly got control of all those regional lords that had emerged in the wake of the invasions. King Philip II -- called “Augustus” because he so increased the power of the Capetian monarchy – provides an excellent example of this process. He increased royal power in France by developing more efficient institutions of government. He sent royal tax gathering officials into every region he brought under royal control and he developed a centralized financial administration in Paris. King Philip increased the efficiency of royal justice through improved record-keeping and by sending traveling judges throughout his kingdom to hear cases in his name. Customary law within the kingdom was codified and the renewed study of ancient Roman law helped royal officials organize, supplement, and rationalize the laws of the French kingdom.

This burgeoning royal bureaucracy and its more extensive use of written records in both financial and legal administration created new opportunities for people who could read and write. Indeed, across the twelfth century, young people had flocked to schools in urban centers where in addition to basic literacy skills, they studied logic, rhetoric, and law. Particularly successful schools at Bologna, Oxford, and Paris developed into the first universities. Both religious and secular leaders understood the value of these emerging institutions and offered them protection. The rise of universities in medieval Europe is particularly associated with the rise of strong monarchies. Many of those educated in the medieval universities went directly to work in the

administrations of Europe’s powerful monarchs. Medieval students, like students today, went to universities in order to get good, high-paying jobs. Indeed, so abundant were the “career” opportunities for graduates of medieval universities that the University of Paris required everyone who attained the Master’s degree to remain and teach at the University for two years – that was the only way the university could maintain an adequate teaching staff!

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Besides the universities, other aspects of European culture in the central Middle Ages were connected with the rise of strong monarchies. Gothic architecture, for example, was first developed by a key advisor of the Capetian monarchs of France. From 1140 on, we know that Abbot Suger began rebuilding the church of Saint Denis and he strove to create a more elevated, soaring space befitting to royal ceremony and to create a more light-filled atmosphere around the altar. Thus, the style he innovated had huge stained-glass windows and used pointed arches and ribbed vaults to create high, soaring ceilings. To accomplish this new look, the master masons who built Saint Denis had to resolve some staggering engineering challenges. The main problem was to buttress the outward thrust of vaulted ceilings built of stone and brick. In earlier medieval churches, this had been done by making the walls very thick and limiting the number and size of windows that weakened the buttressing weight of the wall. His master masons solved this problem by creating huge buttresses that stood at a distance from the thin, window pierced walls of the church, and transferring the outward thrust of the heavy vaulted ceilings to the buttresses via slender, precisely placed, fly-overs. These “flying buttresses” – essential to the stability of the structure – were then fancifully decorated with gargoyles and other sculptures, creating the signature “look” of the Gothic style.

Although still highly aristocratic, European society had achieved a great deal over the Central Middle Ages. By 1300 medieval Europe had developed powerful monarchies, both secular and ecclesiastical, that brought order and stability to western peoples. These early “states” fostered cultural development – the rise of the

universities, the flourishing of courtly song and literature – and undertook Europe’s first expansionist

movements, establishing several “colonies” in the eastern Mediterranean through the Crusades. By 1300 the European economy was booming: trade within Europe fostered the growth of cities, Italian merchants had built long-distance trading networks in the eastern Mediterranean, and they traveled as far as China to procure luxury products for European markets. Technological advances in shipbuilding and navigational aids, the development of banking, insurance, and other commercial structures, all combined to yield a highly dynamic entrepreneurial capitalism in Western Europe. The prosperity and confidence of the west in this era is evident in the immense, soaring gothic cathedrals built in cities all across Europe.

Europe changed a great deal over the Central Middle Ages. After the year 1000, the population of Europe began to grow. This led first to an agricultural revolution and then, with the revival of urban life it made possible, to a commercial revolution. This commercial revolution, the revival of long-distance trade and complex

manufactures, is the birth of capitalism. The new economy led to religious changes – the crusades, new religious orders, missionary efforts beyond Europe, and the emergence of papal monarchy. It also made possible the development of strong, centralized monarchies in England and France. The new political order fostered cultural efflorescence: it’s in this period that Europe’s first universities emerged, Gothic cathedrals were built, and courtly love celebrated the aristocratic ethos of European society.

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