Medieval People

Vivid Lives in a Distant Landscape - From Charlemagne to Piero della Francesca

Michael Prestwich

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780500772300
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Contrary to modern myth, medieval people lived in an era of innovation more than of superstition. This beautifully illustrated, highly readable book will appeal to all those who want a truer picture of a world often wrongly represented today.

People in the Middle Ages did not believe the earth was flat; torture was far less common than in later centuries; and technological advances included guns, printing, blast furnaces, spectacles, stirrups and the compass.

Medieval People tells the life stories of seventy individuals across Europe and the Middle East from the ninth to fifteenth centuries - monarchs and merchants, popes, peasants and poets, artists and adventurers, saints, scholars and soldiers.

Empire builders such as Charlemagne, and Chinggis Khan (Genghis Khan) are included as well as influential women such as Matilda of Tuscany, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Joan of Arc. Religious figures range from Urban II, the pope who started the Crusades, to Hildegard of Bingen and Thomas Becket, martyred archbishop. Fulk Nerra, pioneering castle builder, sits beside the great Persian polymath Avicenna. James Douglas, hero of Scottish independence, rubs shoulders with Dante and Giotto.

Note: The ebook edition includes the complete text of the printed book with a reduced number of illustrations.

800–1100

Of all the Germanic peoples who settled in what was once the Roman Empire, the most successful were the Franks. In the fourth century, they were settled in the Rhineland region; by the early sixth century, their king, Clovis, had established his rule over much of the old Roman province of Gaul. When the Frankish ruler Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800, his empire stretched from the North Sea to the Pyrenees, and eastwards to the Adriatic. His was a new dynasty, which had replaced the previous Merovingian kings in 751 when his father, Pepin, was crowned. Although the Carolingians were new to the royal title, they were not new to power, having been influential since the early eighth century. Charles Martel, from whom the dynasty takes its name, had held the key position of mayor of the palace under the Merovingians, and defeated a Muslim army invading from Spain at the battle of Tours in 732.

A gold panel from the thirteenth-century shrine at Aachen, showing the emperor Charlemagne dedicating the church to the Virgin Mary. Cathedral Treasury, Aachen. Photo Ann Münchow.

Charlemagne’s empire, however, was not a structure that could be kept together, nor did he intend it as such. It had thrived as it expanded, but it began to fall apart once that expansion ceased. When Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, died in 840, the empire was divided between the latter’s three sons. By the end of the ninth century, Carolingian rule had largely collapsed, due to dynastic divisions on the one hand, and external pressures from the Vikings, Magyars and Arabs on the other.

Viking expansion transformed much of Europe in this period. Under the Vikings, trade, piracy, conquest and colonization combined in an extraordinarily productive mix. Viking traders in the east used the great Russian waterways to travel as far as the Black Sea, and the principality of Kiev was of Viking origin. In the west, in the ninth century, coastal raids were followed by deeper incursions, with longships sailing up the Seine to Paris and beyond. New Viking states were established, such as the duchy of Normandy, the product of an agreement between the Carolingian ruler of France, Charles III, and a Viking leader. King Olav I of Norway, who died in 1000, was a representative of this changing world: he was both a traditional Viking raider and a convert to Christianity.

The career of the Norman Emma, queen to the English king Æthelred and to the Danish king Cnut, illuminates the connections that existed between England, Scandinavia and Normandy. In 1066, the Normans achieved an astonishing triumph when Duke William defeated the English king Harold at Hastings. Even more remarkable was their success in the Mediterranean. They had begun to infiltrate southern Italy in the first quarter of the eleventh century; by 1061, they had started the conquest of Sicily from the Arabs, a process they completed by 1091.

In 911, the same year as the foundation of the duchy of Normandy, the last Carolingian ruler in Germany, Louis the Child, died. A new dynasty, known as the Ottonian, or Liudolfing, was established in 919 by Henry the Fowler, duke of Saxony. In the year 1000, the young emperor Otto III emphasized his links to the Carolingian past when he had Charlemagne’s body exhumed. The Ottonians, however, were in a position to assume leadership only of the eastern part of the former Carolingian empire. The central part of that empire, which included Italy and Burgundy, lacked any unity, and these lands were soon subdivided into a complex patchwork.

In the west, after the death of its last Carolingian ruler, Hugh Capet took the French throne in 987. His Capetian dynasty would last, with direct descent from father to son, until 1328. In France, as Carolingian authority and institutions collapsed, power was increasingly concentrated in duchies, counties and smaller lordships. Castles, providing administrative and military bases for nobles, were built by rulers such as Fulk Nerra of Anjou, instead of communal defences such as town walls. The lordship exercised from such castles was based on force rather than on legitimate traditional authority. Yet to see this as evidence of a general crisis or even revolution is to wear blinkers that limit vision largely to France. In northern Italy, it was cities rather than local nobles that were beginning to take over as older power structures declined.

The cultural achievements of the Carolingian and Ottonian worlds were notable. While the imperial courts were important, monasteries such as Corvey and Reichenau formed the intellectual and artistic powerhouses of western Europe. Magnificently illustrated manuscripts demonstrate the wealth and confidence of these institutions. The deep Classical learning to be found in them is displayed by the plays and other writings of a canoness from the abbey at Gandersheim, Hrotsvit. The true intellectual powerhouses of this period, however, lay not in the west, but in the Muslim world. Just as much as Christian Europe, Islam was heir to the learning of the ancient world. Scholars such as Ibn Sīnā, known in the West as Avicenna, advanced knowledge across a broad front from medicine to philosophy.

Spain provided an interface between western Christianity and Islam; the porous frontier in the peninsula saw Islamic learning transmitted to the Christian world. By the late eleventh century, however, in the age of the warlord El Cid, attitudes were beginning to change. Differences were sharpened by an increasingly zealous Islamic ideology and a newly aggressive Christianity. El Cid himself, however, was prepared to serve both Muslims and Christians.

The Church in the west went through regular cycles of reform and decline. Papal reform began in 1046, when the German emperor Henry III deposed three rival popes. Reformers questioned the right of emperors and kings to appoint bishops and to invest them with spiritual authority. Clerical marriage and the buying and selling of positions in the Church were attacked. The papacy became increasingly radicalized, notably under Gregory VII, who was elected pope in 1073. However, the papacy’s spiritual weapons, such as excommunication, were not sufficient in face of the hostility of the emperor Henry IV. Material assistance was needed, and Gregory’s alliance with Matilda, countess of Tuscany provided him with invaluable support, in what has become known as the Investiture Dispute. A compromise was not reached until 1122 in the Concordat of Worms.

Carolingian art echoed that of ancient Rome. This manuscript illustration shows Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald being presented with a book. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. Lat. 1, f. 423.

In 1095, the papacy demonstrated its leadership of the Christian west when Pope Urban II preached the crusade. There was immense enthusiasm for a holy war which promised the remission of penance, the acquisition of lands in the east and the recovery of Jerusalem. The arrival of the crusaders in Constantinople presented the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos with considerable problems, as the history written by his daughter, Anna, records. The Byzantines had first to deal with an unruly rabble led by Peter the Hermit, and then to manage the ambitions of the nobles in the main expedition. Given the inadequate planning of the crusade, and the fact that the army took the difficult overland route to Constantinople and onward across Asia Minor, it is astonishing that the crusaders should have captured Antioch, let alone gone on to take Jerusalem itself. In the aftermath of this triumph, new crusader states were established, headed by the kingdom of Jerusalem. It was to prove much harder to defend them than it had been to found them.

FIRST MEDIEVAL EMPEROR IN WESTERN EUROPE

742–814

Charles the Great, or Charlemagne as he has become known, suffered from insomnia. He kept a wax writing tablet under his pillow, so that when he woke he could try to write, though forming the letters was beyond him. This was an exceptional failing in an extraordinary man, who became king of the Franks jointly with his brother, Carloman, in 768, sole ruler in 771 and emperor in 800.

Charlemagne’s contemporary biographer, Einhard, described him in detail. He was tall and well built. His head was large, his hair fair, his eyes piercing. His neck was rather short, and his nose on the long side. His voice was shrill. Normally, he wore Frankish dress, much as his people did. He particularly liked roasts, and in his final years was angry with his doctors when they urged him to eat his meat boiled. Another writer, Notker, considered that ‘the emperor struck terror into everyone’. In old age, Charlemagne could be impatient. He wrote to one official regarding bridge tolls: ‘We have given you orders before, out of our own mouth, and you have not understood us.’ He had a questioning mind. In an interrogation of his bishops and abbots he asked: ‘Who is that Satan or enemy whose works and pomp we renounced at baptism? This is to be seen into, lest any of our people should follow him in his wrongdoings.’

Charlemagne was a great Christian warlord. His most formidable opponents were the Saxons, a Germanic people similar in many ways to the Franks, but unlike them in being pagan and having no kings. A series of campaigns developed from raids into full-scale conquest, which was not finally achieved until 803. The war was brutal; in 782, a reported 4,500 prisoners were massacred by the Franks. Saxons were pushed into rivers in mass forced baptisms. Charlemagne’s armies also fought in Aquitaine, Italy, Brittany, northern Spain and Hungary. Failure was rare. In 778, his forces suffered a famous defeat at the hands of the Basques at the pass of Roncesvalles, later commemorated in the Song of Roland, but this did not halt Frankish expansion.

The key to Charlemagne’s military success was not so much brilliant generalship as superb organization. His armies were recruited by means of sophisticated systems of military obligation. Attention was given to horse-breeding. Care was taken over logistics and provisioning, with legislation requiring ‘flour, wine, sides of bacon and other food in abundance, hand querns, adzes, axes, augurs, slings and men who can use them properly’. Instructions were even given for the construction of waterproof carts, which could be floated across rivers.

Government of Charlemagne’s vast dominions, which extended across much of western Europe, was no simple matter. Regular assemblies enabled him to keep a finger on the pulse of his empire. Much was done by word of mouth at these gatherings; even at its largest, there were no more than a dozen clerks in Charlemagne’s writing office, issuing administrative and legislative instructions known as capitularies in growing profusion as the reign proceeded. Special commissioners, called missi, were sent round regularly to check up on the conduct of the counts, who were responsible for government at a local level.

The royal estates were the backbone of Carolingian rule as Charlemagne journeyed around his lands, moving from one palace complex to another. Detailed instructions commanded, for example, that no one should press grape...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other titles of Interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Medieval World
• 1. An Age of Empires
• 2. An Age of Confidence
• 3. An Age of Maturity
• 4. An Age of Plague
• 5. An Age of Transition
• Further Reading
• Sources of Quotations
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright