Chapter Summary

The economic and social transformation of Europe was just as dynamic as the political reform of the West. Increased population, economic productivity, and literacy reshaped European culture.

By the tenth century the medieval peasantry had become an undifferentiated class of dependent agricultural laborers commonly referred to as serfs. Their subservient status was reflected in lack of access to public courts, owed labor services, and payments in kind. Living conditions for the peasantry were generally poor. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries the amount of land under cultivation increased. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the amount of land under cultivation increased. The introduction of the moldboard plow and new techniques of crop rotation (the three-field system) allowed for greater increase in yield. While men worked the fields, women undertook the domestic tasks and cloth production. Expansion at first created a demand for labor and allowed peasants to negotiate less onerous contracts with the landholding aristocracy. Eventually, customary service gave way to money payment and rents. In the western portions of Europe, the peasantry tended to become increasingly free of aristocratic control. As a result, the agricultural marketplace evolved into a commercial venture responding to the pressures of supply and demand. In the open market, some peasants flourished while others sank into landless poverty. In contrast to the western regions of Europe, the aristocratic landlords gained greater control over the peasantry of eastern Europe.

The basis for aristocratic society was warfare. By definition, an aristocrat was a warrior, or knight. The classic example of feudal society existed in northern France. In some cases, this warrior elite descended from members of the noble clans of the Carolingian period. In order to limit membership in the aristocratic elite, inheritance was limited to a single heir usually the oldest son. Daughters and younger sons were excluded from sharing in the distribution of wealth and land. By the twelfth century, the most important aristocratic families were virtually independent lords of the territories they controlled.

Training for martial life began in youth and continued through the age of sixteen to eighteen, at which time young men were admitted formally into the ranks of knights. After knighthood, younger sons without access to land lived a bachelor lifestyle predicated on winning an estate or attracting attention through participation in military campaigns or mock warfare, the tournaments. Only those with access to land could marry and initiate a “house.” Lifestyles for women were scarcely less dangerous. Women were eligible for marriage at age sixteen. They were primarily valued as childbearers. Numerous births reduced life expectancy for medieval women. As lineage was determined by male lines and as society was predicated on warfare, women lost social status. Aristocratic society was structured on the control of land and of agricultural workers or serfs who provided the labor. To obtain land, knights became vassals of greater lords. A vassal received land, or a fief, in return for loyalty and military service. Pyramids of vassalage and lordship created political hierarchies all over Europe. In England and the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, the hierarchy of vassalage culminated in a single authority, the king. In other regions feudal loyalties were more local, and conflicting islands of lordship were created under counts and dukes.

The Church sought to meet the needs of both the aristocratic warriors and the rural peasantry. Priests held mystical powers utilized to harness the supernatural on behalf of their parishioners. Saints were regarded as powerful intercessors between this world and eternity often through the cult of the saints. Tombs were focal points for the cult of the saints. Many of these tombs were located in monasteries, and the monks directed the development of the cults. Monks also undertook the task of prayer for the souls of all departed Christians, not only the saints. Aristocrats made grants of land for the foundation of monasteries to ensure perpetual prayers for their souls after death. The Benedictines established the model for monastic lifestyle in western Europe. Benedictine life was predicated on obedience symbolized by the monks’ submission to an ordered round of daily prayers. As the recipients of aristocratic largesse, monasteries rapidly accumulated large quantities of land and other types of wealth. Some within the monastic communities began to call for a return to simplicity and a separation from the material world. The Cistercians, under the leadership of Bernard of Clairvaux, tried to withdraw from the rest of the Christian community by establishing new monastic houses in the wildernesses of western Europe. The Church, through the Peace of God, attempted to curtail random violence typical of a society based on militarism.

To redirect the martial vigor of aristocratic society, Pope Urban II called on Western knights to serve in an army dedicated to Christianity. The First Crusade resulted in the creation of feudal principalities in the Holy Land. As the first experiment in European overseas colonization, the feudal kingdoms of the crusaders made few accommodations with the religious and social customs of the Levant. Later crusades lost both the original pious fervor and the military success of the first. The Second Crusade, launched to prop up the crusader states, ended in military failure in Asia Minor. When Jerusalem fell to the Muslims, the Third Crusade attempted to recapture the holy city, but failed. The Fourth Crusade was sidetracked into an assault on the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. Subsequent Crusades won no military laurels.

In the thirteenth century crusaders experienced short-lived hope of finding a new ally against the Muslims in the Mongol empire. The Mongols were nomadic warriors from Central Asia similar to the Huns and Magyars that had reached Europe centuries earlier. They were united under the leadership of Temujin (c. 1171-1227) commonly known as Genghis Khan (Universal leader) and went on to conquer an empire that reached from China to Iran and Hungary. The unification of these territories created a vast trade network across the Eurasian continent. The Mongol rulers adopted much of the local culture of the peoples they conquered.

Crusades appealed to younger sons of the feudal nobility and lesser knights, who saw in them opportunities to obtain land and enhance their social status. Although often glorified, Crusades were less than noble military exercises in greed more than piety. The crusading ethic often included anti-Semitism and indiscriminant slaughter of innocents. When kings of more centralized states came to see the Crusades as wasteful, the era of the Crusade came to an end.

Towns represented the social opposite of the rural countryside. Serfdom did not exist there, nor did most towns recognize the authority of the military aristocracy. Towns were, however, the purveyors of manufactured goods and services sought by all members of rural society.

In the Italian peninsula, unlike elsewhere in western Europe, urbanism had never disappeared during the Germanic invasions. By the eleventh century, Italian towns asserted their supremacy as commercial centers, carrying trade throughout the Mediterranean. Urban fleets both carried goods and protected traders. Greater cities, such as Venice and Genoa, established colonies of merchants at the ends of trade routes to China and the East. The Crusades offered opportunities for extending the commercial empires of the Italian towns. In 1204 crusaders under the direction of the Venetians actually captured Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. International trade spurred the development of merchant law, business administration, bookkeeping, and credit contracts. Despite the antipathy of the Church, credit became the foundation for the expansion of medieval commerce.

By the twelfth century, Italian towns sought to declare their independence from regional lords and expressed their solidarity by the creation of urban communes. Communes established their own jurisdictions over prices, markets, and taxation. The communes were divided in loyalties between magnates who controlled the communal government and the popular corporations who controlled the guild organization of commerce and crafts. Disputes between magnates and populars often erupted into open conflict and alliance with outside forces, the German empire or the papacy. Italian urban government consisted of a series of councils. All males were members of the arengo, or assembly. As the arengo was normally too unwieldy to carry on the actual functions of government, smaller working councils carried on the actual tasks of administration. Executive authority of the communes resided with consuls. In order to overcome the tendency to factionalism within the commune, trained public administrators, the podestas, were often hired.

Commercial activity in northern Europe centered around the northern seas, the Baltic and the North. The greatest concentration of urbanism in northern Europe was located in the Low Countries at the mouth of the Rhine River. Town growth was based on the development of the woolen cloth industry. The social organization of northern towns differed from that of Italy due to the absence of an aristocratic group of magnates. At the top of the society of northern European towns were the wholesale merchants or patricians who purchased raw materials and sold the finished products. The wholesale merchants monopolized urban government. Next were the masters of the craft guilds who controlled the production of woolen cloth through the processes of weaving, dyeing, and fulling. At the bottom were the unskilled and semiskilled laborers in the employ of the guild masters.

Providing a conduit for the exchange of goods between the northern towns and the Italian towns were the fairs of Champagne, annual markets located in the very center of Europe in eastern France. Products from north and south, both luxuries and more mundane items, were bought and sold in these fairs.

Towns spawned a religious culture and lifestyle peculiarly urban. Universities developed out of the early cathedral schools where the educational emphasis was on the ancient tradition of the trivium and quadrivium. With the expansion of urban life, education separated from the control of the bishops and the cathedral clergy. At Bologna in Italy, the study of law and the preparation of professional urban administrators were the focal point of the educational system. Students, who were customarily not citizens of the town, formed their own guild, or universitas, that controlled the curriculum, the appointment of instructors, and the conditions of life.

In northern Europe, Paris emerged as the greatest educational center. Unlike Bologna, the guilds of the university at Paris were composed of masters. Student life at the university was often rough and rowdy. In the early twelfth century the leading intellectual in Paris was Peter Abalard (1079-1142) he combined the tools of legal analysis with Aristotelian logic as the basis for the Scholastic method. Received through the intermediation of Muslim philosophers in Spain, Aristotle became the chief authority for scholasticism. By the outset of the thirteenth century, the study of Aristotle consumed the theologians of the University of Paris. At first, the authorities of the Church regarded the application of Aristotelian logic as heretical. It was Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who bridged the chasm between Aristotle and ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Aquinas applied Aristoteian philosophy to the most important theological questions.

Monasticism with its demands for isolation was not well suited to the urban lifestyle. In the environment of the town, the orders of friars fulfilled the need for a militant Christian vocation. Dedicated to the controversial principle of poverty, Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) founded the Friars Minor or Franciscans. The Franciscans devoted themselves to public preaching and to education. Similarly, the Dominicans, named for their founder, Dominic de Guzman (1170-1221), were dedicated to Christian evangelism and teaching. Both orders became mainstays of the universities of Europe.

Two types of political entities existed in the Middle Ages. The papacy and the Germanic Empire laid claim to universal authority. The kingdoms of France and England were more limited in their concept of government.

Although the Carolingian empire had lapsed, the Germanic traditions were less disturbed in the easternmost territories. There the empire was restored under the Saxon dukes of northern Germany, particularly Otto I (936-973). In order to establish some sort of administration, the Saxons relied heavily on the bishops and archbishops of Germany and Italy. The emperors, whose office remained elective, were never able to subdue fully the other members of the German aristocracy. In addition to the clergy, emperors appointed technically unfree servants called ministerials to defend strategic points within the empire. By the twelfth century, the ministerials achieved freedom and added to the welter of conflicting jurisdictions in Germany as imperial knights. From Otto I on, German emperors were intent on control of northern Italy and the papacy. In the long run, Germany was abandoned to facilitate the Italian policies of successive dynasties. In particular, the imperial involvement with the papacy was a fatal entanglement. Emperor Henry III initiated a period of papal reform. From this secular beginning, clerical reformers tried to free the Church from imperial control. At the heart of the struggle for independence was the issue of “lay investiture.” The issue reached a crisis during the reign of Pope Gregory VII (1073-1084) and resulted in armed conflict between the supporters of the papacy and the emperor. The debate was not settled until the Concordat of Worms in 1122. Papal authority after the middle of the twelfth century was based increasingly on the development of an ecclesiastical legal system, the canon law. Church courts were established in every diocese in western Europe. Moreover, the canon law empowered the popes to make new laws at will. The use of the canon law reached its height under Pope Innocent III (1l98-1216). During his reign, the Fourth Lateran Council was called to define the fundamental doctrines of the Church. Despite papal successes, the ability of the papacy to enforce its will throughout western Europe was called into question at the end of the thirteenth century. Monarchs of centralized secular states such as England and France successfully opposed the papacy, sometimes with force.

Kings, unlike emperors, claimed only regional rather than universal authority. The kings of France began as regional aristocrats surrounded by peers who were in many cases more powerful than the kings. France was favored by a dynasty, the Capetians, who continuously provided male heirs from 987 to 1314. From their capital at Paris, the Capetians slowly built a more centralized kingdom. The founder of a united France was King Philip II Augustus (1180-1223) who acquired enormous territories by marriage alliances, warfare, and crusade. He established a new administrative system based on salaried agents called baillis and seneschals, who administered justice and collected royal taxes. A permanent central court system staffed with professional jurists was the creation of Philip’s grandson, Louis IX (1226-1285). Gradually the power and independence of the regional aristocrats in France declined.

The centralized kingdom of England was the creation of the Norman Conquest of 1066. William the Conqueror retained portions of the administrative system of Anglo-Saxon England while imposing the French system of feudal vassalage. All land in England was held directly from the king. William’s successors created a central treasury system, the Exchequer and a central court. The most important legal reformer was Henry II (1154-1189). Henry successfully imposed the jurisdiction of royal courts over both aristocratic and ecclesiastical tribunals. Under King John (1199-1216) and Henry III (1216-1272), the barons of England were able to gain some voice in the government. John was forced to accept the Magna Carta, or great charter of liberties that placed the English king under the rule of law. King Edward I (1272-1307) formalized the participation of barons in government by the creation of a parliament. As the wealth of the towns made them attractive sources of revenue, urban representatives also became customary attenders at parliament. By 1300 England and France had become the most centralized governments of western Europe. Because their governments could make more efficient use of their national resources, they were also the most powerful.