Europe in the High Middle Ages

1150-1300

John H. Mundy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582369870
• eBook ISBN: 9781317878209
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

A revised and updated new edition of Professor Mundy's lively introduction to Europe 1150-1300. It provides a portrait of the social, economic, political and intellectual life of Latin Christendom in the period. Wherever possible the men and women of the high middle ages are allowed to speak for themselves as Professor Mundy makes wide use of contemporary sources xxx; bringing alive the complexities and concerns of people living in medieval times. Another strength of the book is the attention devoted to groups often marginalised in other histories; looking at the experience of women, for instance, and that of the Jews in a predominantly Christian society.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The subject matter

The view of the past advanced by historians is often obscured by fogs or mists specific to each historical period. Those of medieval history are because Europe’s culture was then ecclesiastical, whereas today’s is secular. Secular thinkers seek to find the origins of the institutions and thought that they applaud, and hence when looking for today’s ancestors vault back over the Middle Ages to Greek and Roman antiquity. Their opponents, modern folk who go to church, are in a sense impoverished because they experience only a subculture dominated by secularism. One result is that they dote on the Middle Ages, an age that becomes for them a weapon with which to attack the present. After the disasters of recent European history, one understands their doubts about secularism, but their Middle Ages is too full of idealized persons and institutions to be real.

Modern research has defined the differences between classical, medieval and modern times, and contrasted the otherworldly emphasis of late antique and medieval thought with the thisworldly emphasis of moderns and of their predecessors in antiquity. This truthful distinction has, however, encouraged some to go too far. To them, today’s thisworldly thought promotes rational propositions, those within reach of demonstration, whereas yesterday’s otherworldly thought was religious, beyond, that is, the reach of the same. Institutions are confused with ideas: the Church becomes religion, so to speak, and the state and other secular institutions embody reason. This overlooks the fact that, although there are many differences between the two ways of thinking, they have something in common, namely their love of propositions that transcend human reason. Many convictions of today’s secular thinkers about, for example, human free will, moral potential, the necessity of personal freedom for social and economic advancement and humanity’s central role in the cosmos are as fanciful as any mystery found in Christianity, Judaism or Islam.

Using the ideas expressed by the words ‘religious’ or ‘rational’ to describe motives for human action is both traditional and valid. To reject either one of them in favour of the other, however, is to misuse them. Some say, for example, that a person or group acted only for religious motives; others counter that they were solely animated by rational, economic or material motives. One wonders what such definitions mean. Men and women play games: they turn prayer wheels, recite God’s names, make music, work on puzzles or perform calculations. When done by a man or woman alone, these have little to do with the society in which the person lives, but seem instead to be means of testing his or her harmony with the nature of things. When they play with others or before an audience, however, play becomes a way of competing or joining with other men and women. What prompted the game in the first place is that many, indeed most, feel that there is a natural order into which they can fit themselves, or of which they can make use. This desire is tied to society, but transcends – much as play does – the specific social world in which individuals live. One reason is that the problems that engender this feeling are uniform throughout history: birth, for example, growth, sickness and death, and also humanity’s ever-exuberant hope for freedom and love. These are expressed by a mixture of rational and religious passions and ideas. The desire to avoid death, for example, causes humanity both to people the other world with possibly imaginary souls and to work rationally to prolong life in this one.

The characteristics of particular periods especially attract historians because they distinguish one age from another. They also bulk large in the sources for historical study, probably because humans spend little time being born, loving or dying but a great deal in life’s routines. Only sleep takes more time than these. Experience nevertheless teaches that the primal activities are more consequential, because humans are basically moved by the need to discover and use the right order of things to attain love and retain life. Historians are therefore obliged to recognize the similarities of human desire in the many languages, secular or ecclesiastical, technical or commonsensical, scientific or mystic, lent to them by transient institutions, philosophies and religions. One recalls, for example, a debate as to whether the ideas of Karl Marx were mainly drawn from the thought of his time or instead arose within himself, having few or no outside sources. This debate really rehearsed arguments about free will and determination, ones as far beyond demonstration as the old scholastic ones pitting innate natural capacity against the need for an infusion of divine grace. Once, moreover, the intrinsic similarities of some modern and medieval propositions about humanity’s role in the deity’s providence or in natural history are perceived, one begins to understand why people are addicted to propositions beyond demonstration.

This addiction presumably derives from need. Will the cancer kill me? Or, am I really loved? All that can be done to answer such questions is to hope and play games; besides, although recourse to propositions beyond proof often inhibits human freedom, history also shows that it sometimes helps it. Most institutions have been built on humanity’s reasonable and demonstrable needs for health, material welfare and a measure of freedom in the disposition of talents and goods. In late Rome, however, these normally healthy drives and their concomitant institutions were so overwhelmed by internal disruption and external attack that the people found them inordinately oppressive, and therefore turned to the other world, the world beyond demonstration. Rome’s inhabitants rejected Greco-Roman earth-centred reason, religion and society and gave loyalty instead to religious mysteries. Christianity’s obscurantism was not only a failure of nerve but also a liberating secession from service to state and society and from the self-defeating race for wealth, learning and well-being.

The institutional precipitate of this revolutionary attitude was the medieval Church. Starting from late Rome’s state church, an evolution of some six centuries led to a new structure of governmental and social power. Empowered by society, ecclesiastical authority headed by the Roman pontiffs was raised to counterbalance lay power, thus making practical liberty a matter of choosing between secular and ecclesiastical authority, institutions and patterns of thought, by using one against the other. If one seemed unduly inhibiting, men and women could and did turn to the other. Great though it was, this balance between the two powers was only temporary and lasted from about 1000 to 1400. During the period of clerical leadership, of which the central century is treated in this volume, the disruption of this medieval synthesis was announced. Called on to direct the world’s practical life as well as to sing religion’s anthems, the clergy itself began to turn from theology to philosophy, from mystery to reason, from the other world to this one.

These considerations lead this author to assume that few or no human activities lack a religious dimension, an appeal to, or a use of, propositions beyond demonstration, nor to call on what can be projected to be reasonably likely on the basis of human experience in nature. The genesis of heresy (belief differing from that of the majority), for example, has been ascribed by some to religious belief and by others to social or economic motives. In this book there is no dichotomy: the medieval believer, doubter or heretic is described as both a religious and an economic person.

There are also divergent ways of viewing the relationship of nations, classes, groups and sexes. Many feel that the powerful always abuse the weak, the warlike the pacific, the rich the poor, and men women. Conjecturing that societies based on violence are bound to lack solidarity’s cement, others instead assert that the mutually profitable use of one by the other has held society together throughout history. Although lamenting servitude, for example, some modern writers – Marx among them (when talking about Greek slavery) – have asserted that without it, there would have been no culture. Still, all that can really be shown is that labour is necessary for civilization, and that coerced work sometimes has advantages over free. Greco-Roman civilization was spread towards the Rhine and Danube valleys from the shores of the Mediterranean in part by a temporary increase of servitude, but that does not mean that coercion was necessary. History only seems to say that oppression sometimes helps humankind and harms it at others.

Some contemporaries have been so sickened by past human savagery that they discern no profit in history because, to them, it merely provides models for bad behaviour. This position is odd: to deny hideousness suppresses much of real living and all of dying. Others, too numerous to cite, love selectively, explaining away evil and emphasizing the good. Their past is read in terms of their present: good institutions and good people have led to today’s fulfilment. In the view of some, the medieval attempt to extirpate heresy and attack Islam and Judaism was unhappy, but also necessary because the Church created and defended European culture. Again, the subordinate place of women and the exploitation of peasants by townsmen and lords were functional because without their labour there would have been no monuments of art or letters. It is nevertheless likely that medieval men and women were of two minds: Jews and Muslims were detested, but intellectually admired; serfs scorned, but also emancipated; women brutalized, but also loved as equals.

Some hope to teach a moral lesson by asserting that the exploitation of others is always self-defeating and hence destroys the unjust. Like the mad, individuals and societies undoubtedly often repeat actions to excess, persisting in behaviour that causes defeat. But is there a necessary link between self-destruction and the unjust? One can surely exist without the other, as the long duration of awful empires attests, not to speak of the lengthy lives of some appalling persons. Someone might nevertheless object that all empires have fallen; but then all individuals have died, and surely not because of self-destruction.

In a sense, death is independent of humanity and its institutions and, because of the fear it inspires, precipitates both human invention and destruction. Having given life, nature launches all into a race from oncoming death. Children, men and women are the runners, who combat their neighbours, young against old, men against women, debtors against creditors, families, provinces, nations and races, one against the other. But it is also true that, from the brief commerce of these racers, new life derives to run yet further distances, as do exchanges of information, momentary but fond solidarities and relatively long-lived institutions and cultures. In addition, fear for their own futures make the actors worry about what they do to others, but, given the rapidity of death’s approach, only hasty and partial restitution can be made. The history of individuals and societies further shows that excess is wrong or self-defeating. But, overborne by death’s rush and the hordes driven before it, who can know when he or she has passed the limit? An historian of such vertiginous scenes had best avoid moralizing, and instead imitate Benedict Spinoza, who pleaded for objectivity:

When I apply my mind to history, I intend . . . to deduce from human nature nothing outrageous or unheard of but instead those things that best fit experience. I will inquire into the things pertaining to this science with the same freedom of spirit one is accustomed to use in mathematics, and will sedulously take care not to laugh at, lament or execrate, but rather understand human actions.¹

¹ Tractatus politicus 1 4 in Opera (ed. Carl Gebhardt, Heidelberg 1925) 274.

The tendency to read modern experience back into history must also be resisted. One example is the notion that economic expansion is necessarily accompanied by growing human freedom. This opinion is surely mistaken, because Europe’s early modern expansion was accompanied by a great increase in slavery. Again, reflecting the ‘triumph of the bourgeoisie’ in the French Revolution, some historians believe that merchants were progressive, but that churchmen, nobles and peasants were backward. This view is both irrational and also overlooks the prohibition of usury, which, along with technological change, made all the difference between medieval and modern economic individualism or capitalism. Lastly, many of the same scholars, however much they otherwise disagreed, claimed to have found an essential and original difference between northern urbanism and that of the Mediterranean. Serving as capital of a province and housing rural landowners, the ancient city was said to have lived again in medieval Italy, whereas the northern city created a new urbanism led by a bourgeoisie free from the trammels of rural society. This medieval bourgeois city was consequently the foundation of the progressive modern and capitalist mercantile and manufacturing city; an original creation, then, of northern European, perhaps of German, culture. This book argues instead that, in origin though not in development, northern and southern medieval towns were fundamentally similar.

Today’s Church seeks autonomy, claiming a sphere exempt from the omnipresent power of the secular state. This urge is understandable, but it has also inspired not a few to maintain that medieval papal assertions of what seem like expressions of political will and power really dealt only with moral or spiritual questions. Sometimes useful, this position is usually mistaken because most churchmen and pontiffs wanted to ‘reform’ political institutions in order to support a church that, in their view, taught humanity how to attain heaven. Again, the opinion that, by failing to reform in this period, the papal Church invited its overthrow during what Protestants call ‘the Reformation’ is surely doubtful. It is wholly unlikely that the reforms envisaged by modern Christians would have prevented that great transformation.

A final and personal note: I much regret that the political and social history of Scandinavia, the Iberian peninsula, south Italy and Sicily, Slavic Europe and Greek and Saracen areas are hardly touched on in this book. The decision to neglect these subjects is partly because one book cannot treat everything and partly because I fear writing about societies whose languages I cannot read. Readers may nevertheless remember that institutions in Scandinavia, Hungary and the nearby Slavonic states were similar to those seen earlier in Italy and the west of Europe during the Carolingian period. Another deficiency is that this book barely touches on the history of art, architecture, music and literature, but a justification is that these are specialized subjects best left to the technicians who work on them.

History, biography and poetry

The large majority of the primary sources cited in this book derive from charters containing contracts, testaments, local customs and other economic and constitutional materials. To these may be added legal treatises written by canonists (specialists in church law) and civilians (those teaching law, especially Roman, in the schools) and by government officers in monarchies or republics. In addition, churchmen, especially academics, and an occasional layman produced literature dealing with government and the relations of Church and state, forms of political and social organization as well as theology, both dogmatic and moral. These materials will be described in the later chapters of this book.

More fascinating to many readers are texts that allow them to see how successful the individual actors on history’s stage were, whether they foresaw the future or were able to understand their present. Although a natural desire because life requires models, this urge easily becomes a cult of human fame, a partial equivalent of medieval canonization, and – even about today’s personalities, when sources are abundant – gives rise to questionable work. The difficulty is that, even when honourable persons or biographers explain motives, their revelations suffer from a natural reluctance to disclose interests. Besides, very few medieval texts describe the intentions (whether false or true) of actors or depict their intimate feelings and conduct. Some do, however, even pieces close to saints’ lives. The so-called autobiography of Peter, the hermit of Monte Morrone, who became Pope Celestine V (pope 1294, d. 1296), gives a relatively frank view of its hero’s milieu. Similarly, the life of the canonized king of France, Louis IX, issued by John, lord of Joinville, in 1309, sketches, with unusual realism, aspects of the king’s behaviour and qualities, as well as those of his courtiers and clergy. On the whole, however, biography and autobiography were rarer in medieval than in modern or contemporary history. This lack is not crippling. If most of the texts reporting the lives and feelings of Abelard and Heloise are late, for example, they clearly show what contemporaries believed to be their institutional and mental contexts. If, then, specific persons are rarely fully seen, what people thought about, their ways of acting and their plans for living are easily perceived. Apart from treatises on theology, philosophy, law and government and contemporary illumination, painting and sculpture, the two most instructive types of sources are the many histories and literary pieces composed in this period.

Although the elegance of an Otto of Freising (d. 1158) was not surpassed in the period with which this volume deals, universal history was well represented. Other than the English historians mentioned below, good examples are the Pantheon of Godfrey of Viterbo (d. 1191) and the Historical Mirror of the Dominican encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais (d. circa 1259). Similar in tradition was William of Nangis (d. 1300), a monk in the royal monastery of St Denis that, from about 1274, began to produce the semi-official annals of the French monarchy, the Great Chronicles. There were also specialized histories with a large chronological range like Martin of Troppau’s (d. 1278) papal and imperial history, a version of which was finished by 1258.

Partly because their treatment of antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages was usually distilled from earlier sources, historians were more original (although not less biased) when dealing with their own times. Among the best were England’s prolific chroniclers William of Newburgh (d. 1198), Roger of Hoveden (d. 1201) and the great Matthew Paris (d. 1259), a monk of St Albans, who also illustrate how information could be transmitted with accuracy and detail from one part of Europe to another. Each significant event evoked its historians. An example is the German monk Helmhold’s (d. 1177) history of the conquest of the Baltic Slavs. Among the best chroniclers of the crusades in the Near East was William, archbishop of Tyre (d. circa 1186), gifted in Arabic and Greek, who also wrote a lost, although much cited, account of the oriental states.

Some events were covered thoroughly by contemporaries. The Albigensian crusade of 1209 and the introduction of the inquisitors into Languedoc in the 1230s, for example, were recorded in the general French and English chronicles. Local and specific histories also expressed every possible point of view, save that o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of maps
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• PART ONE: EUROPE
• PART THREE: SOCIETY
• PART FOUR: GOVERNMENT
• PART FIVE: THOUGHT
• PART SIX: 1300
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Index