The Eastern Mediterranean Frontier of Latin Christendom

Jace Stuckey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472422750
• eBook ISBN: 9781351891226
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

By the turn of the millennium, the East Mediterranean region had become a place of foreigners to Latin Christians living in Western Europe. Nevertheless, in the eleventh century numerous Latin Christian pilgrims streamed toward the East and Jerusalem in anticipation of the end times. The Apocalypse did not materialize as some had anticipated, but instead over the course of the next few centuries an expansion of Latin Christendom did. This expansion would transform the political, economic, and cultural landscape of both East and West and alter the course of Mediterranean history. This volume presents 22 critical studies on this crucial period (1000-1500) in the development of the Western expansion into the Eastern Mediterranean. These works deal with economy and trade, migration and colonization, crusade and conquest, military orders, as well as religious diversity and cross-cultural interaction. It includes a bibliography of important works published in Western languages together with an introduction by the editor.

Introduction

The eleventh century has often been characterized by medieval historians as being the beginning of a period of significant expansion for European society. In fact, Robert Bartlett went so far as to mark this critical era as the ‘making of Europe’.¹ He was quite right to emphasize the important developments of this era. The Church was in the midst of major attempts at reform and reorganization. New towns and markets were emerging. The establishment of centralized political power was on the horizon in many parts of Latin Europe and Western European powers would push aggressively on all their frontiers. Expansion in many sectors would continue at a frenetic pace until the onset of the Black Plague in the mid-fourteenth century.²

One of those frontiers was the East Mediterranean, which by the turn of the millennium had increasingly become disconnected from the everyday lives of most of the Latin West. In fact, R.W. Southern in his classic The Making of the Middle Ages contended that ‘from the Adriatic eastwards, Latin Christendom lost contact with the Mediterranean coastline’.³ In essence, the East Mediterranean region had become a place of foreigners to Latin Christians living in Western Europe. The Latin language was used only sparingly in the Byzantine territories and knowledge of Greek was virtually non-existent in the West. There was a growing divide between the Orthodox and Catholic faiths that would culminate in the eleventh century with the Great Schism and mutual condemnations and excommunications from both sides. Additionally, the ancient lands of the Near (Middle) East where Christianity had been born had been under Islamic rule since the seventh century and probably seemed even more distant to Latin Christians in Western Europe.

However, although they may have had only limited contact with much of the East Mediterranean, ‘the East’ as a concept still had great meaning and allure to Western Christians and was a central part of their spiritual worldview. One only needs to examine the various mappae mundi produced throughout Europe placing Jerusalem in the center of the world to see the concept. It can also be detected in the writings of the monk Ralph of Glabor who began writing his Five Books of History shortly after the turn of the millennium. In this work, he highlights some of what he considered the most critical events around the year 1000, which included the rise of heretical movements throughout Europe, as well as a number of famines and natural disasters, and a tremendous increase in the numbers of pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem, a trip that was rowed not sailed and followed routes little changed from the those followed in the ancient world as John Pry or demonstrates in Chapter 2 of this volume.⁴

Although Glabor may have overemphasized the amount of apocalyptic fervor throughout Christendom, he does give his readers a sense of the important place of Jerusalem and the East in the collective imagination of Latin Christendom in the early eleventh century. Even while most Christians from the West would never visit the city or pray at the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem was the centre of the earthly realm. In fact, Glabor would write that in this era, Europe covered itself in a ‘white mantle of churches’ (France, 114–117). But, even those early Romanesque churches separated from the Holy Land by more than 1,000 miles, and like their more famous Gothic successors, would ultimately still be oriented toward Jerusalem and the East.⁵

Glabor would go on to discuss the mass pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1033 for the Millennium of the Passion. According to Glabor, Latin Christian pilgrims streamed toward Jerusalem in anticipation of apocalyptic events. One of those pilgrims was the monk, Ademar of Chabanne (989–1034) who was a prolific writer in his own right and someone who produced copious works with commentary on apocalyptic ideas. Ademar, like others who followed the same route, would die in the Holy Land without his expectations being realized. The Apocalypse did not materialize as Ademar and many had anticipated, but instead over the course of the next few centuries, Latin Christians would become increasingly engaged in both overt and subtle ways, with the East Mediterranean frontier, where Jerusalem and the East Mediterranean lands ceased to be just part of the Western collective imagination where the heavenly city lay, but instead became a part of the growing world of Latin influence in political, economic and cultural terms. Of course, it was not only pious pilgrims who made the difficult journey, but so too did a number of Italian merchants as David Jacoby demonstrates in his discussion of trading networks in Chapter 3 of this volume. Jacoby’s work also concludes the first part of the book that covers some of the broader patterns of movement of peoples and goods to and from the East. Here, I have chosen specific essays that present a ‘Braudel-like’ panoramic of the ebb and flow of the Mediterranean world through travel and the movement of peoples and goods throughout East and West. Latin trade and settlement in the East had both a short- and long-term impact on the economies of both ends of the Mediterranean.

The years 1000 and 1500 provide provocative and convenient, if imperfect, bookends for the general time frame of this collection of essays. One of the primary goals of the collection is to expand historical discussions centering on the ‘rise of the west’ to include the earlier medieval context. Too often, and for far too long, the perception of this era has been seen simply as the prelude to the modern or as the distant precursor to the rise of the West. As an alternative this volume will offer a much more comprehensive and ultimately longer view of western expansion and interaction along the Eastern Mediterranean frontier. The essays here represent diverse topics and give insight into an era of increasing multi-cultural interaction and economic and political development, emphasizing the themes of movement, conflict and expansion.

Although the period in question does possess unique developments and events that shaped the subsequent rise of the West, scholars rightly contend that Western society did not suddenly become relevant at the turn of the first millennium after centuries of dormancy in the dark post-Roman period. It is equally important to keep in mind that the study of the developments beginning in the early eleventh century can unintentionally lead to a flawed interpretation that Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages lacked significant developments, which is certainly not the goal here. In particular, the work of Peter Brown has been indispensable in demonstrating, among other things, that the profound long term social and cultural changes that took place in late antiquity represent much more than a sad chronicle of decline and decay in post-Roman Mediterranean society.⁶ Instead, this era witnessed the development of sibling cultures that ultimately led to the divergent legacies of the civilizations that surrounded the Mediterranean Sea, which in their own time and own way came to be heirs to the Roman tradition. The Mediterranean world continued to be a multi-cultural society in the post-Roman period, but ceased to be a coherent empire and gave way to political and religious fragmentation. Brown’s work, as much as that of any other scholar, has forced historians to contend with a much more complex world of Late Antiquity in both the East and West.

More recently, in his Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300–900, Michael McCormick gave scholars of early Medieval Europe an image of a post-Roman society in the West that not only traded throughout the northern and western parts of Europe, but across the Mediterranean and beyond. In this era, instead of a closed and stagnant economy, Westerners engaged the Mediterranean in the exchange of various wares, spices and, perhaps most prominently, slaves. It is a world McCormick argues where, ‘Christian travelers in the Mediterranean can be observed and counted, not in the tens and twenties, but in their hundreds’.⁷ Similarly, Chris Wickham has demonstrated that the society in Western Europe of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages was one of critical economic and social development that had as much continuity as disconnect from the Roman World of the previous era. However, as Wickham demonstrates, the Roman world is often seen as a whole or as a single entity, whereas the history of the early Middle Ages is often defined not by a sense of wholeness, but by division and regional variation.⁸ During the Roman period, there was clearly diversity throughout the Empire, but also an equally persistent sense of interconnectedness that existed simultaneously making Rome the centre of a truly Mediterranean society.

In many ways, this has been a major topic for scholars since Henri Pirenne in his Mohammad and Charlemagne proposed that much of Northern Europe become isolated from the Mediterranean after the rise of Islam.⁹ It may in fact be difficult, as Pirenne suggested, to imagine a ‘Charlemagne’ in the early medieval world without a ‘Muhammad’, but many subsequent scholars have challenged Pirenne’s theses. With the significant increase of work by historians and especially archeologists since the 1960s, scholars are far more likely to take the position that Latin activity in the Mediterranean may have slowed, but never came to a screeching halt after the fall of Rome or with rise of Islam.¹⁰ Although hardly discussed explicitly in the essays in this volume, Pirenne is ever-present since his ideas forced scholars to assess the complex relationship between the emerging Latin Kingdoms of Northern Europe and Mediterranean after the fall of Rome and during the rise of Islam. Since their publication, Pirenne’s ideas have been challenged and revised significantly, but nevertheless, when scholars discuss the ‘Eastern Mediterranean’ at the beginning of the eleventh century, they are implicitly and rightly acknowledging that this had become a world largely disconnected from the West. However, this was to change significantly in the centuries to come.

Both continuity and change in Mediterranean travel is the subject of Chapter 1, ‘Coastal Shipping and Navigation in the Mediterranean’ by Michel Balard who gives readers a general overview of Mediterranean shipping as well as the challenges posed by the geography. Here, Balard discusses the relationship between the ‘land’ and ‘sea’ and describes Mediterranean sea travel as ‘the most effective link between coastal cities’. He highlights the shipbuilding sites, the various different types of craft, navigation techniques and the most prominent trade routes. Much of the practice, especially the navigation routes were inherited from antiquity as were the challenges and advantages of Mediterranean Sea travel and trade. In all, Balard paints a picture of a Mediterranean society teaming with commercial activity where ships and their traders linked two ends of the Mediterranean by ‘a chain of staging posts’ and where ships rarely lost site of the shoreline while distributing a variety of goods from Catalonia and Italy to Alexandria and Rhodes.

The West’s engagement and interaction in the East Mediterranean bet...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• Index