INTRODUCTION

DISCOVERY

“Now the disease in Byzantium ran a course of four months,” wrote Procopius, “and its greatest virulence lasted about three. And at first the deaths were a little more than the normal, then the mortality rose still higher, and afterwards the tale of dead reached five thousand each day, and again it even came to ten thousand, and still more than that” (Fordham University). A 6th century Roman government official working in the court of Emperor Justinian, Procopius had the misfortune to hold a front row seat to the outbreak of a virulent epidemic disease. In great detail he recounted the suffering of the victims, the lack of effective treatments, and the inability of survivors to bury the increasing numbers of dead. Until the early 21st century, historians used the limited surviving written sources from the time period to try to understand the epidemic that struck the Byzantine empire and traveled throughout the Mediterranean. Written sources record the arrival of the disease in Pelusium Egypt (a port town) in 541 CE. By 542 CE authors recorded the arrival of the disease in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. From there it is recorded as “spreading through Syria, Anatolia, Greece, Italy and North Africa. By 543 it had struck both Roman and Persian-held sectors of Armenia, as well as Gaul. It is recorded to have reached as far afield as Ireland by the following year” (Sarris 2022). Recurrent outbreaks of the plague were recorded through the 8th century. Based on descriptions of the illness, scholars are able to hypothesize that the disease was the Bubonic Plague. Because the disease was recorded in the Byzantine Empire during the rule of Justinian, it has often been referred to as the Justinianic Plague or the Plague of Justinian. This naming has also tended to place emphasis on the impact and spread of the plague in this region of the ancient world.

Over recent decades, the ability of scientists to conduct DNA analysis on ancient bones has advanced and scholars are able to verify that the disease that Procopius and others recorded was indeed the Bubonic Plague, caused by the bacteria yersinia pestis. In fact, a 2018 study of DNA derived from 6th century burials in Edix Hill England revealed that a number of the deceased died while carrying yersinia pestis bacteria. This further indicates the far reach of this plague, beyond the Byzantine Empire and the Mediterranean. Significantly, “phylogenetic analysis of the evidence revealed the strain of Y. pestis found at Edix Hill to have been the earliest lineage identified to date of the bacterium involved in the sixth-century pandemic” (Sarris 2022). This indicates that the plague reached England much earlier than anticipated.

Our current analyses of the spread and impacts of the plague during the 6th increasingly rely not only on eyewitness accounts, but also increasingly on “historically focused scientific enquiry (ranging across fields as diverse as dendochronology, vulcanology and the study of ancient DNA” (Sarris 2022). These scholarly developments have not only opened the door to new research on the past, but have also invigorated longstanding debates over how we understand that past. In fact, the 6th century plague has become one such topic of vigorous discussion in academic circles. Scholars have long argued over the extent of the impact of the Justinianic Plague. In 2019 a team of six scholars including historians, a historical epidemiologist, and an evolutionary biologist published an article “The Justinian Plague: An inconsequential Pandemic?” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The scholars argue that current consensus assigns the plague a key role in the demise of the Roman Empire. In contradiction to that consensus, the authors argue “that earlier estimates are founded on a small subset of textual evidence and are not supported by many other independent types of evidence (e.g., papyri, coins, inscriptions, and pollen archaeology. [They] therefore conclude that earlier analyses of the mortality and social effects of the plague are exaggerated, and that the nontextual evidence suggests plague did not play a significant role in the transformation of the Mediterranean world or Europe” (Mordechai et al 2019).

In response to the article, Professor of Byzantine Studies, Peter Sarris, published an article in Past & Present that raises issues not only with the findings detailed in the 2019 article, but also with the historical methods used. Sarris challenges the teams read on the historiography of the Justinianic plague, arguing that there has never been mass consensus on the impact of the plague. Rather, Sarris notes that in addition to scholarly disagreement on the topic, the consequences of the plague would have differed widely based on the context of the outbreak. Outbreaks in urban areas would have likely had a greater impact as spread would have been facilitated by crowded living spaces and high mortality rates would have had a larger impact on tax collection and other state functions. Additionally, scholars would likely find more records of disease outbreaks in urban settings in comparison to rural areas for which written records are already scarcer. One of the other concerns Sarris raises is that “Mordechai, Eisenber et al. […] downplay the significance of our plague accounts by means of statistical analysis (primarily through their chosen technique of putting a selection of words concerned with plague through search engines such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae”  in an effort to analyze the quantity of times the plague is mentioned in writing” (Sarris 2022). Sarris provides his own analyses and contradictions of their findings and relates that it can be problematic to “attempt to ʻquantifyʻ written evidence” and to prioritize this “over contextual engagement with the primary sources” (Sarris 2022). Sarris then provides his own close reads of primary sources, such as Byzantine law codes directly related to the plague.

It seems then, that within the world of history, arguments prevail not only over conclusions about the past, but over the ways in which those conclusions are reached. Where then does that leave us, students at the beginning of a journey to understand the past? Perhaps these ongoing debates serve best as a reminder that history (no matter how ancient) is not dead and relegated to a list of facts and statistics, it is a living and ever changing field of study. Advances in scientific fields and the merging of these fields with the humanities provides new and exciting ways to understand the past.

OVERVIEW

Ever since the 15th century, historians of Europe have referred to the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Italian Renaissance (which took place in the 15th and 16th centuries) as the Middle Ages. The term signifies that Europe was undergoing a transitional period: it stood between, in the middle of, those times that we call “modern” (after 1500 CE) and what we call the ancient world (up to around 500 CE). This influential era was a time of grim choices and hardships as well as some constructive developments, all of which led to the emergence of modern European (Western) civilizations. By the 1400s – 1500s CE, as Europeans achieved political and social stability and recovered from the worst aspects of the Medieval Period, several defining European traditions had taken firm root. Many legacies from this Medieval period are still visible today as prominent features in Western societies. Historians divide the Medieval age of European developments into four periods:

• Early Medieval Period (circa 500-900)
• Central Medieval Period (900-1100)
• High Medieval Period (1100-1300)
• Late Medieval Period (1300-1500)

This Medieval Period would see a new culture grow up that combined elements of Germanic culture, Christianity, and remnants of Greco-Roman culture. Thus although the Roman empire ceased to exist as a united territory in the way it had during preceding centuries, continuity in politics, culture, and religion existed in the West. In the East, control by a centralized state continued under the rule of Emperors (Caesars). The Roman Empire continued after the 5th century CE but was smaller and its character changed; the focus was on the Eastern Mediterranean. To separate this period of an Eastern-based smaller empire from the earlier, much larger, Roman Empire, historians refer to Eastern remnants as the Byzantine Empire.

SUCCESSOR KINGDOMS TO THE WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE

Germanic Peoples

The peoples who migrated into the Roman Empire over the course of the 4th and 5th centuries spoke Germanic languages and belonged to several different tribes. These Germanic tribes included the Angles and Saxons, who later merged to become the Anglo-Saxon peoples of Northern France and the British Isles. Another Germanic group, the Franks, settled in what is today Northern France and Germany. In addition to various Germanic tribes, northern tribes included the Picts in Scotland and far-ranging Celts who spread throughout the British Isles as well as northern France. Southern regions of Europe were populated by tribes such as Burgundians, Lombards, Ostrogoths and Visigoths (Eastern and Western Goths.) In Germanic tribal societies, bloodline and kinship served as the basis of identity. While diversity existed amongst the Germanic speaking peoples, they shared several common features. For example, the northern Germanic tribes and tribes in southern Europe were particularly militaristic. A warrior elite led by tribal chiefs dominated, with power based on military prowess and the ability to command the loyalty of tribal warriors. Military skills, strength, courage and loyalty in battle were valued and admired qualities.

Within the tribe, reciprocal relationships were of paramount importance, a key tribal tradition that would later deeply influence the culture of the Medieval Period. Leadership and order in the tribe was sustained through individual relationships and obligations between members of the tribe. Most critical was the relationship between chiefs and warriors based on mutual trust and duties. Binding mutual obligations were maintained informally through oaths and customs – there were no formal courts or written law codes enforcing them. Tribal chiefs ruled based on the support of the warrior elite who shared status, power, and wealth with chiefs, making up the military elite. This cultural emphasis on reciprocal relations was at the heart of feudal relations and social functioning.

Another important feature was tribes were settled societies, not nomadic. Germanic tribes, Celts, and Goths were land owners; land possession was a critical measure of wealth and status in these tribal cultures. Battles and wars between different tribes were often fought over land and to gain territory. The reward for victorious warriors was often a plot of captured land. An emphasis on land ownership remained a fundamental part of Medieval culture.

The Germanic-speaking tribes had long existed as neighbors of the Roman Empire, living primarily on the borders, with large numbers of men serving as mercenary soldiers in the Roman army. Centuries of contact with Romans meant that these communities adopted some elements of Greco-Roman culture, with many converting to Christianity. Despite some level of assimilation, Germanic peoples maintained their local languages, dialects, and social and political traditions, all of which shaped the development of Europe from the 6th century onward.

Beginning in the 4th century CE nomadic Huns began to push up against the borders of the Roman empire. This drove Germanic peoples living on the outskirts of the Roman empire to migrate into Roman territories in search of security and resources. The sacking of Rome by Visigoth forces in the middle of the 5th century CE was a stark indication of the end of Roman control in the West.

During this time the Catholic Church increasingly looked to the bishop of Rome for leadership. By the 5th century, the bishop of Rome had gradually come to take on an increasing level of prestige among other bishops. Rome had been the city where Peter, whom tradition regarded as the chief of Christ’s disciples, had ended his life as a martyr. Moreover, even though the power of the Western Roman Empire crumbled over the course of the 5th century CE, the city of Rome itself remained prestigious. As such, by the 4th and 5th centuries, the bishops of Rome were often given the title of papa, Latin for “father,” a term that we translate into pope. Gradually, the popes came to be seen as having a role of leadership within the wider Church, although they did not have the monarchical authority that later popes would claim. The popes would also play an important role in legitimizing and supporting the rule of several Germanic monarchs.

By the early 500s CE, in the aftermath of the collapse of Roman political and military control in the region, Germanic peoples established a set of kingdoms in what had been the Western half of the Roman Empire.  The Vandals ruled North Africa in a kingdom centered on Carthage, a kingdom whose pirates threatened the Mediterranean for nearly eighty years. The Visigoths ruled Spain in a kingdom that preserved many elements of Roman culture. In Italy, the Roman general Odavacar established his own kingdom in 476 CE before being murdered by the Ostrogoth king Theodoric who established a kingdom for his people which he ruled from 493 CE to his death in 526 CE.

In the region of Gaul, the Franks were a Germanic people who fought as mercenaries in the later Roman Empire and then, with the disintegration of the Western Empire, established their own kingdom. One key reason for the Frankish kingdom’s success was that its kings received their legitimacy from the Catholic Church. The Church had endorsed the Roman Emperors since Constantine and, in return, these emperors supported the Church; the Frankish kings took up a similar relationship with the Christian religion. King Clovis (r. 481–509 CE) united the Franks into a kingdom, and in 496 CE converted to Christianity. More importantly, he converted to the Catholic Christianity of his subjects in post-Roman Gaul. This would put the Franks in sharp contrast with the Vandals, Visigoths, and Ostrogoths, all of whom were Arians.

In none of these kingdoms, Visigothic, Ostrogothic, Frankish, or Vandal, did the Germanic peoples who ruled them seek to destroy Roman society – far from it. Rather, they sought homelands and to live as the elites of the Roman Empire had done before them. Theodoric, the king of the Ostrogoths (r. 493–526 CE), told his people to “obey Roman customs… [and] clothe [them] selves in the morals of the toga” (Andrea 1997, 58). Indeed, in the generations after the end of the Western Empire in the late 400s, an urban, literate culture continued to flourish in Spain, Italy, and parts of Gaul. The Germanic peoples often took up a place as elites in the society of what had been Roman provinces, living in rural villas with large estates. Local elites shifted their allegiances from the vanished Roman Empire to their new rulers. In many ways, the situation of Western Europe was analogous to that of the successor states of the Han Dynasty such as Northern Wei, in which an invader took up a position as the society’s new warrior aristocracy.

But though the Germanic kings of Western Europe sought to simply rule in the place of (or along with) their Roman predecessors, many of the features that had characterized Western Europe under the Romans – populous cities; a large, literate population; a complex infrastructure of roads and aqueducts; and the complex bureaucracy of a centralized state – vanished over the course of the 6th century. Cities shrank drastically, and in those regions of Gaul north of the Loire River, they nearly all vanished in a process that we call ruralization. As Europe ruralized, elite values came to reflect warfare rather than literature, and schools gradually vanished, leaving the Church as the only real institution providing education. So too did the tax-collecting apparatus of the Roman state gradually wither in the Germanic kingdoms. Whereas the Europe of 500 may have looked a lot like the Europe of 400, the Europe of 600 was one that was poorer, more rural, and less literate.

BYZANTIUM

An observer of early 6th century Italy would have thought that its Ostrogothic kingdom was the best poised to carry forward with a new state; in spite of being smaller than the Roman Empire, it nevertheless had most of the same features. But the Ostrogothic kingdom would only last a few decades before meeting its own violent end. That end came at the hands of the Eastern Roman Empire, referred to as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, the half of the Roman Empire that continued after the end of the Empire in the West. The inhabitants and rulers of this Empire did not call themselves Byzantines, but rather referred to themselves as Romans. Their empire, after all, was a continuation of the Roman state. Modern historians call it the Byzantine Empire in order to distinguish it from the Roman Empire that dominated the Mediterranean world from the 1st through 5th centuries. The Byzantine Empire or Byzantium is called such by historians because Byzantium had been an earlier name for its capital, Constantinople.

The Age of Justinian

By the beginning of the 6th century, the Byzantine Army was the most lethal army outside of China. In the late 5th century, the Byzantine emperors built up an army capable of dealing with the threat of both Hunnic invaders and the Sassanids, a dynasty of aggressively expansionist  kings who seized control of Persia in the 3rd century. Soon this army would turn against the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy. The man who destroyed the Ostrogrothic as well as the Vandal kingdom was the Emperor Justinian (r. 527–565 CE). Justinian was not born a member of the aristocracy, rather his family rose through the ranks of the Byzantine military to the throne. Upon his accession to the imperial throne, Justinian carried out a set of policies designed to emphasize, and thus legitimize, his own greatness and that of his empire. He did so in the domain of art and architecture, sponsoring the construction of numerous buildings both sacred and secular. The centerpiece of his building campaign was the church called Hagia Sophia, Greek for “Divine Wisdom.” His architects placed this church in the central position of the city of Constantinople, adjacent to the imperial palace.

The location of the Hagia Sophia was meant to demonstrate the close relationship between the Byzantine state and the Church that legitimized that state. The Hagia Sophia would be the principal church of the Byzantine Empire for the next thousand years, and it would go on to inspire countless imitations. At the time of its construction, the Hagia Sophia was the largest building in Europe. Its domed roof was 168 feet in height, and, supported by four arches 120 feet high, it seemed to float in the diffuse light that came in through its windows. The interior of the church was burnished with gold, gems, and marble, so that observers in the church were said to have claimed that they could not tell if they were on earth or in heaven. Even a work as magnificent as the Hagia Sophia, though, showed a changed world: it was produced with mortar rather than concrete, the Roman technology for the making of which had already been forgotten.

While Justinian’s building project was meant to project the religious legitimacy of his authority and right to rule, his efforts as a lawmaker showcased the secular side of his authority. Under his direction, the jurist Tribonian and a group of legal experts took the previous 900 years’ worth of Roman Law and systematized it into a text known as the Body of Civil Law or the Justinian Code. The team analyzed thousands of legal texts with the aim of eliminating redundant or outdated laws and organizing the remaining relevant laws in a cohesive and thematic manner. This process was meant to expedite the legal process and eliminate legal misinterpretations. This law code, based on the already-sophisticated system of Roman law, would go on to serve as the foundation of later European law, and thus of much of the world’s law as well.

Unfortunately, for all of its achievements, the Justinian Code also institutionalized preexisting anti-semitism in the Byzantine Empire. A number of law codes limited Jewish rights including (but not limited to) their ability to testify in court against Christians, their ability to buy ecclesiastical property, and the ability to practice their religion in North Africa. Jews also lost civil rights in those Germanic kingdoms whose law was influenced by Roman law and suffered from forced expulsion from several Germanic kingdoms. Persecution was rooted in the belief of many Christians that Jews were at fault for the execution of Jesus. Refusal to convert to Christianity resulted in persecution. Modern scholars have determined that expulsion and persecution were rooted in “politics, xenophobia, and scapegoating” (Sloyan ND). A Christian Empire was one that was often extremely hostile to Jews.

As a Byzantine (Roman) emperor, Justinian would have regarded his rule as universal, so he sought to re-establish the authority of the Empire in Western Europe. The emperor had other reasons for seeking to re-establish imperial power in Western Europe and other areas previously ruled by Romans. Both Vandal Carthage and Ostrogoth Italy were ruled by peoples who were Arian Christians, regarded as heretics by a Catholic emperor like Justinian.

During a dispute over the throne in the Vandal kingdom, the reigning monarch was overthrown and fled to the Eastern Empire for help and protection. This event gave Justinian his chance. In 533 CE , he sent his commander Belisarius to the west, and, in less than a year, this capable general had defeated the Vandals, destroyed their kingdom, and brought North Africa back into the Roman Empire. Justinian then turned his sights on a greater prize: Italy, home of the city of Rome itself, which, although no longer under the Empire’s sway, still held a place of honor and prestige.

In 535 CE , the Roman general Belisarius crossed into Italy to return it to the Roman Empire. Unfortunately for the peninsula’s inhabitants, the Ostrogothic kingdom put up a more robust fight than had the Vandals in North Africa. It took the Byzantine army nearly two decades to destroy the Ostrogothic kingdom and establish Byzantine rule. In that time Italy itself was irrevocably damaged. The city of Rome suffered through numerous sieges and sacks. By the time it was fully in the hands of Justinian’s troops, the fountains that had provided drinking water for a city of millions were choked with rubble, the aqueducts that had supplied them smashed. The great architecture of the city lay in ruins, and the population had shrunken dramatically.

The Aftermath of Justinian: Crisis

Justinian’s reconquest of Italy and efforts to reestablish Roman rule in Western Europe proved to be short-lived. Less than a decade after restoring Italy to Roman rule, the Lombards, another Germanic people, invaded Italy. Although the city of Rome itself and the southern part of the peninsula remained under the rule of the Byzantine Empire, much of northern and central Italy was ruled either by Lombard kings or other petty nobles.

War was only one catastrophe to trouble Western Europe. For reasons that are poorly understood even today, the long-range trade networks across the Mediterranean Sea gradually shrank over the 6th and 7th centuries. Instead of traveling across the Mediterranean, wine, grain, and pottery were increasingly sold in local markets. Only luxury goods – always a small percentage of most commerce – remained traded over long distances.

Nor was even the heartland of Justinian’s empire safe from external threat. Emperor Heraclius (r. 610–641 CE) came to power in the midst of an invasion of the empire by the Sassanid Persians, who, under King Khusrau, threatened the Empire’s very existence, his armies coming within striking range of Constantinople itself. Moreover, Persian armies seized control of Egypt and the Levant, which they held for over a decade. Heraclius thwarted the invasion only by launching a counter-attack into the heart of the Persian Empire which resulted, in the end, in a Byzantine victory.

No sooner had the Byzantines repelled one threat than another appeared that threatened the empire with consequences far more severe. Under the vigorous leadership of the first Islamic caliphs, Arab Muslim armies representing the Umayyad Caliphate invaded both Sassanid Persia and the Byzantine Empire. At the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 CE, although the Byzantines and Arabs were evenly matched, the Byzantine field army was badly beaten. In the aftermath, first Syria and Palestine, and then Egypt, fell from being under Christian Byzantine rule to Islamic rule. Following their conquest of Egypt, the Umayyad Caliphate invested in a navy and laid siege to Constantinople twice, from 674-678 CE and again from 717 to 718 CE.

The 7th century also saw invasions by various semi-nomadic peoples into the Balkans, the region between the Greek Peloponnese and the Danube River. Among these peoples were the Turkic Bulgars, the Avars (who historians think might have been Turkic), as well as various peoples known as Slavs. The Avars, nomads on the plains of central Europe, posed a significant threat to the Byzantines as a raiding force. They were able to demand large payments from the Byzantines in exchange for safety. In addition, Bulgars and Slavs settled in Balkan territories that no longer fell under the rule of the Byzantine state. Within a generation, the empire had lost control of the Balkans as well as Egypt, territory comprising an immense source of wealth in both agriculture and trade. As the Byzantine Empire weakened, collection of taxes declined. The Byzantine state continued to mint coins, however, at a lesser amount. The economy was demonetized and fewer and fewer transactions were processed in cash. There is evidence of ruralization as more and more Byzantines moved from urban areas to rural ones. The threat of invasion led communities to move to smaller settlements on more easily defended hilltops. The great metropolises of Constantinople and Thessalonica remained centers of urban life and activity, but throughout much of the Empire, life became overwhelmingly rural.

Even literacy rates shrank. The days of the Byzantine state in which a large literate reading public would buy readily-available literature were gone. Literacy increasingly became the preserve of the religious and the wealthy elite. By the end of the 7th century, the Byzantine Empire was a shadow of its former self.

In an effort to strengthen the empire, the Byzantines reorganized the military. Instead of having a military that was paid out of a central treasury, the emperors divided the empire up into regions called themes. Each theme would then equip and pay soldiers, using its agricultural resources. Themes in coastal regions were responsible for the navy. In many ways, the theme was similar to the way that other states would raise soldiers in the absence of a strong bureaucratic apparatus. One might liken it to what we call feudalism in Zhou China, Heian Japan, and later Medieval Europe.

The Iconoclast Controversy

Another crisis faced by the Byzantine Empire in the 8th century was religious in nature. Historians refer to it as the Iconoclast Controversy. From the 4th and 5th century onward, Christians living in the Eastern Mediterranean region had used icons to aid in their worship. These Christians were iconophiles. Examples of icons included highly stylized paintings of Christ, the Virgin Mary (his mother), or the saints. Often icons appeared in churches, with the ceiling painted with a picture of Christ or with an emblem of Christ above the entrance of a church. Other Christians opposed this use of images. In the Old Testament  the Ten Commandments forbid the making of “graven images” and using them in worship (Exodus 20:4-5). Certain Christians at the time believed that to make an image even of Jesus Christ and his mother violated that commandment, arguing that to paint such pictures and use them in worship was idolatry, that is, worshiping something other than God. These critics were known as iconoclasts. Muslims leveled similar critiques at the Christian use of icons, claiming that it showed Christians had fallen from the correct worship of God into idolatry.

Emperor Leo III (r. 717–741 CE) accepted these arguments; consequently, in his reign, he began to order icons removed (or painted over) first from churches and then from monasteries as well as other places of public display. His successors took further action, ordering the destruction of icons. These acts by Leo led to nearly a century of controversy over whether the use of icons in worship was permissible to Christians. The iconophiles argued that to use a picture of Christ and the saints in worship was in line with the Christian scriptures so long as the worshiper worshiped God with the icon as a guide, while the iconoclasts proclaimed that any use of images in Christian worship was forbidden.

In general, monks and civilian elites were iconophiles, while iconoclasm was popular with the army. In Rome, which was slipping out from under the jurisdiction of the Byzantine emperors, the popes strongly rejected iconoclasm. Some historians have argued that Leo and his successors attacked icon worship for reasons other than religious convictions alone, including the fact that monks who venerated icons had built up their own power base. In addition, in confiscating the wealth of iconophile monasteries, the iconoclast emperor would be able to redirect the riches to other ventures, like funding his armies.

The iconophile Byzantine empress, Irene, ruling on behalf of her infant son Constantine V (r. 780–797 CE ), convened a new church council in 787 CE, the Second Council of Nicaea, to bring an end to the controversy. The Council decreed that icons could be used in worship. The Council also established a lasting precedent that every church altar should contain a relic, the remains of a saint. The Councilʻs ruling was confirmed by the pope. However, the final resolution of the Iconoclast Controversy was not achieved until 843 CE, when the empress Theodora at last over­turned iconoclastic policies for good upon the death of her husband, Emperor Theophilus (r. 829–843 CE). From this point forward, modern historians usually refer to the Greek-speaking churches of the Eastern Mediterranean and those churches following the same patterns of worship as Eastern Orthodox. This is because churches in the Eastern Mediterranean and Eastern Europe differed enough in terms of practice, worship, and thought that we can refer to them as distinct from the Catholic Church of Western Europe. At the time, however, both Churches in the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediter­ranean and those following the pope would have said that they were part of the Catholic Church (the word catholic comes from a Greek word for “universal”). The formal break would occur centuries later.

The Macedonian Emperors of Byzantium: Recovery

For Byzantium, the 9th and 10th centuries represented a time of recovery and expansion under the rulers of the Macedonian Dynasty. The first emperor of this dynasty, Basil I (r. 867–886 CE), a soldier and servant of the emperor, came from a peasant background. He murdered the reigning emperor and seized control of the empire. Basil was an effective emperor. To the east, as the Abbasid Caliphate broke down, he inflicted several defeats on the Arab emirs on the border, pushing the frontiers of the empire further east. Although unsuccessful in fighting to maintain control of Sicily, he re-established Byzantine control over most of southern Italy.

It was under the Macedonian emperors that the Eastern Orthodox culture of the Byzantines spread north beyond the borders of the empire. In 864 CE, the Bulgar khan, whose predecessors had been building a state of their own, converted to Christianity and was baptized. This conversion allowed the Bulgar state to gain religious legitimacy in the eyes of the Church, similar to the Byzantine Empire and the kingdoms of Western Europe.

In the 9th century, Cyril and Methodius, missionaries from the city of Thessalonica, preached Orthodox Christianity to the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and devised the alphabet that we today call Cyrillic in order to translate the Bible and liturgy into the Slavonic language. The conversion of Slavic peoples to Orthodox Christianity also introduced them to Byzantine culture and tradition. Subsequent emperors continued to successfully expand the borders and reach of the empire, conquering Syria, the Bulgar state, and parts of Armenia. Alliances with the Slavic peoples also expanded Byzantine influence.

In addition to its mission work, the church worked closely with the Byzantine state to revive the study of ancient literature, including that of the Greeks and Romans. This effort was also meant to improve learning and literacy which had suffered great setbacks during the struggles of the 7th and 8th centuries. The Byzantine Empire had suffered from a collapse of literacy, which, while not as severe as Western Europe’s, had still resulted in a much less literate population. This revival of Greco-Roman philosophy, science, and art is referred to by historians as the Macedonian Renaissance.

Despite its successes during the reign of the Macedonian emperors, the Byzantine state faced challenges. The theme system, used to pay and equip soldiers through use of agricultural surplus,  gradually broke down. Increasingly, soldiers came not from the Byzantine themes, but from the ranks of professional mercenaries, including Norsemen. The soldiers of the themes received less training and served mainly as a militia that would back up the core of a professional army, known as the Tagmata.

Many of the struggles faced by the Byzantine Empire were reflected in the experiences of Western Europe after the 5th century. Both saw a sharp ruralization, that is, a decline in the number of inhabited cities and the size of those cities that were inhabited. Both saw plunges in literacy. And both saw a state that was less competent — even at tax collection. Moreover, the entire Mediterranean Sea and its environs showed a steady decline in high-volume trade across the ocean, a decline that lasted for nearly two and a half centuries. By around the year 700, almost all trade was local.

But there remained profound differences between Byzantium and the Germanic kingdoms of Western Europe. In the first place, although its reach had shrunk dramatically from the days of Augustus, the imperial state remained in the Byzantine Empire. Although the state collected less in taxes and issued less money than in earlier years, even in the period of the empire’s greatest crisis, it continued to mint some coins and the apparatus of the state continued to function. In Western Europe, by contrast, the Germanic kingdoms gradually lost the ability to collect taxes (except for the Visigoths in Spain). Likewise, they gradually ceased to mint gold coins. In Britain, cities had all but vanished, with an island inhabited by peoples living in small villages, the remnants of Rome’s imperial might standing as silent ruins.

WESTERN EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENTS

The British Isles: Europe’s Periphery

In many of the lands that had been part of the Roman Empire, the Germanic peoples who had taken over Western Europe built kingdoms. Although not as sophisticated as the Roman state, they were still recognizable as states. This situation stood in sharp contrast to Britain. To the northwest of Europe, the Roman Army abandoned the island of Britain in 410 CE. The urban infrastructure brought about by the Roman state began to decay almost immediately, with towns gradually emptying out as people returned to rural patterns that had existed prior to Rome’s arrival.

Around the same time the Roman Army withdrew from Britain, a group of Germanic peoples known as the Anglo-Saxons were moving into the island from the forests of Central Europe. The Anglo-Saxons organized themselves under chiefs and kings who ruled over a few hundred to a few thousand subjects each. Over the period between about 410 CE and 600 CE, the Anglo-Saxons gradually settled in and conquered much of southeastern Britain, replacing the Celtic-speaking peoples and their language. The island of Britain under the Anglo-Saxons was was completely rural. All that remained of the state-building of the Romans were the ruins of abandoned cities.

And yet, it was developments in England (called England because the name is derived from the word Anglo- Saxon) and the island of Ireland to its west that led to an increase of schools and literacy across Western Europe. In the 5th century, Christian missionaries traveled to Ireland and converted many of its peoples. In the early 600s, Pope Gregory the Great sent missionaries to the island of Britain. The English peoples adopted Christianity (usually under the initiative of their kings) over the next several decades, which in turn led to the founding of monasteries. These monasteries often had attached schools so that those seeking to live as monks could have access to the texts of the Bible, the liturgy, and the writings of other churchmen. English churchmen like Benedict Biscop (c. 628–690 CE) traveled south to Rome and returned to England with cartloads of books. English and Irish monks would often copy these books in their own monasteries.

Indeed, England saw not only the copying of older books, but also the composition of original literature, which was rare elsewhere in Western Europe of this time. The English churchman Bede (672 – 735 CE) composed a history of England’s people. He wrote this history to detail the adoption of Christianity by Anglo-Saxons. Within a few decades of the island’s peoples converting to Christianity, English and Irish monks were traveling to Western Europe to establish monasteries in lands already Christian or to serve as missionaries to those still-pagan peoples in the forests of central Europe.

It is important to note that although the British Isles were peripheral to global affairs and even those of Western Europe, people at the time did regard these islands as part of the world that people of the Middle East and Mediterranean regarded as “civilized”, even if only as its westernmost periphery. The 9th century Arabic writer Harun ibn Yahya said of the British that “They are the last of the lands of the Greeks, and there is no civilization beyond them” (Green 2016).

The Rise of the Franks

At the western end of the Mediterranean and in Northern Europe, the kingdom of the Franks in northern Gaul became a dominant political power in Western Europe, establishing itself in southern Gaul and subjecting other Germanic peoples to their rule. This was due in part to Justinianʻs conquest of the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy in the 6th century CE and Arab Muslim conquest of Spain in 711 CE. Muslim rule was established in Spain, also known as al-Andalus. The destruction of these two kingdoms left the Franks as the dominant Christian power in Western Europe.

The first dynasty of Frankish kings was known as the Merovingians, named for Merovech, a possible legendary ancestor of Clovis, the first Christian king of the Franks. The Frankish power grew in Western Europe for several reasons. The Frankish monarchy experienced fewer civil wars than did the Visigoths due to generalized strong support for dynastic succession. In addition, beginning with the conversion of Clovis, the Catholic Church provided religious legitimacy to Frankish monarchs.

However, as the Frankish kingdom expanded, many preexisting elements of the Roman state withered. One reason for this decline was that the nature of warfare changed in Western Europe. Soldiers were no longer paid out of a government treasury; instead, they were rewarded with lands whose surplus they would use to outfit themselves with military equipment. The soldiers thus served as a warrior aristocracy. Even those families who had been members of the Roman elite took up a military lifestyle in order to prosper in the new order. In addition, the Frankish kings increasingly made use of a pillage and gift system in which a king or other war leader rewarded his loyal soldiers by granting them gifts that came from the plunder of defeated enemies. With armies financed either by pillage and gift or by the wealth of an individual aristocrat’s lands, the Frankish kingdom had little reason for maintaining taxation. Moreover, the kingdom’s great landowners who supported the monarchy had a strong interest in seeing that they were not taxed efficiently; by the 580s, the Frankish government had simply ceased to update the old Roman tax registers.

One particular role that gained prominence among the Frankish monarchy was that of the Major Domo, or Mayor of the Palace. The Mayor of the Palace was a noble who would grant land and gifts on behalf of the king and who would, in many cases, command the army. Gradually, one family of these Mayors of the Palace rose to prominence above all other noble families in the Frankish kingdom: the Carolingians.

This dominant family’s prominent members were named Charles, which in Latin is Carolus, hence the name Carolingians. By the mid-7th century, the Carolingians had held the position of Mayor of the Palace as a hereditary role. During the early 8th century,  the Carolingian Mayors of the Palace became the actual rulers of the Frankish realm, while the Merovingian kings had little or no actual power. The earliest significant Carolingian Major Domo to dominate the Carolingian court was Charles Martel (r. 715–741 CE). He was an able and effective military commander who – even though he rewarded his troops with lands taken from the Church – proved himself to be a defender of the Christian religion by defeating a Muslim attack on Gaul from al-Andalus in 732 CE at the Battle of Tours. In addition, in 738 CE Charles Martel defeated the Saxons, who were at this point still largely pagans living in the forests to the northeast of the Frankish kingdom. These victories over both pagans and Muslims enabled Martel to present his family as defenders of the Church and of the Christian religion in general.

Martel’s successor, Pepin the Short (r. 741–68 CE), took the final step in wresting power away from the Merovingians and elevating his family to kingship. He followed in Martel’s footsteps by using the Church to shore up his legitimacy. He wrote to Pope Zachary I (r. 741–752 CE) inquiring about the nature of kingship. Pope Zachary answered that kingship should rest with the person exercising its power; because a king ruled the earth on behalf of God, a king who was not properly ruling was not doing his God-given duty. Thus the last Merovingian king was deposed by Pepin, the Carolingian Mayor of the Palace, with the support of Pope Zachary. This close relationship between church and crown would go on to be a defining feature of the Frankish monarchy.

The relationship between the church and the Carolingians involved not only the papal legitimization of Pepin’s coup d’état, but also included Carolingian monarchs providing military assistance to the popes. Shortly after Zachary’s letter allowing Pepin to seize power, Pepin marched south to Italy to give the pope military assistance against the Lombards. He took control of several cities and their surrounding hinterlands and gave these cities as a gift to the papacy. The popes thus ruled a set of territories in central Italy known as the Papal States from Pepin’s day until the mid-19th century.

Perhaps the most famous of the Frankish rulers was Charlemagne, whose name means Charles the Great. As king of the Franks, he spent nearly the entirety of his reign leading his army in battle. To the southeast, he destroyed the khanate of the Avars, the nomadic people who had lived by raiding the Byzantine Empire. To the northeast of his realm, he subjugated the Saxons of Central Europe and had them converted to Christianity – a sometimes brutal process. When the Saxons rebelled in 782 CE, he had 4,000 men executed in one day for having returned to their old religion. To the south in Italy, Charlemagne militarily conquered the Lombard kingdom and made himself its king. The only area in which he was less successful was in his invasion of al-Andalus. Although his forces seized control of several cities and fortresses in northeastern Spain (including  Barcelona), he was, on the whole, less successful against Spain’s Umayyad emirs.

By the end of the 8th century, Charlemagne ruled nearly all of Western Europe and had moved the Frankish capital from Ravenna to Aachen. Indeed, he ruled more of Western Europe than anyone since the 4th century Roman emperors. Charlemagne continued to lend military support to the papacy, providing aid in the winter of 800 CE when a mob expelled Pope Leo III from Rome. Charlemagne led his troops and restored the pope to his position in the Lateran palace, the palace complex to the northeast of Rome where the popes both lived and conducted most of their business.

On Christmas Day in 800 CE, Charlemagne attended worship at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. During that ceremony, Pope Leo III placed a crown upon Charlemagne’s head and declared him to be a Roman emperor. Historians are not sure whether Charlemagne planned this coronation or simply approached the pope for a blessing and was surprised by this crown. The question of who planned this coronation is controversial because the pope’s crowning of Charlemagne as Roman emperor could have been interpreted to mean that the crown and title were the pope’s to confer.

Indeed, it was around this time that a document known as the Donation of Constantine appeared in Western Europe. This document was a forgery – to this day, scholars do not know who forged it – purported to have been written by the Roman emperor Constantine. According to this forged document, Constantine was cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester I and, in thanks, gave the popes authority over all of the Western Empire. Although false, this document would go on to provide the popes with a claim to rule not just central Italy, but Western Europe as a whole. Charlemagne’s coronation by the pope marked the culmination of the creation of a new society built on the wreck of the Western Roman Empire. This new society would be Christian and based on a closely intertwined relationship between Church and State.

The Carolingian Renaissance

In those territories that had been part of the Western Roman Empire, most of the people spoke Latin, and Latin was also the language of literature. By the time of the Carolingians, Latin was evolving into the languages that would eventually become French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. We refer to these languages as Romance Languages because they are descended from Latin, the language of the Romans. The Bible, the liturgy, and writings of theology and on the saints, however, continued to be written in Latin although literacy in the language (and literacy in general) had decreased. With the decline of literacy, fewer books of Roman literature were produced over the years.

It is here, in the realm of learning and literacy, that the Carolingians made lasting contributions. As a leader Charlemagne, in comparison with some of his contemporary rulers, was poorly educated and by some reports, barely literate. Despite this, Charlemagne appears to have possessed a deep appreciation for education. Under the leadership of Charlemagne, the Carolingians supported the revival of the ancient teachings of the Greeks and Romans and strove to improve the state of literacy in the empire. They also sought to increase the number of schools and books in the realm. Historians refer to this effort as the Carolingian Renaissance in order to distinguish it from the later Italian Renaissance, an effort by northern Italian intellectuals of the 14th and 15th centuries to revive and build upon the teachings of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.

In addition to encouraging Greco-Roman scholarship, Charlemagne and his successors sponsored an increase in learning within the Church in order to promote moral reform. Charlemagne, like his predecessors and successors, considered himself a defender and protector of the Christian religion. Moral reform would need to start with clergy, and these clergy would need to be able to adequately read the text of the Bible and of the writings of other churchmen (and women). Beyond the church, concerns about the education of the lay population arose by the 9th and into the 10th century. The ability to read the Bible and prayer books was linked with the ability of the ordinary person to live in accordance with Christian principles.

Charlemagne’s efforts centered on schools and centers of book production, what scholars of medieval Europe call scriptoria (singular: scriptorium). During this time schools and scriptoria, originally founded by English and Irish monks, were typically attached to monasteries. In scriptoria, monks and nuns focused on hand copying texts. However, poor reading ability and lack of knowledge of theology and/or philosophy meant that monks and nuns were occasionally copying, and contributing to, errors in the texts without realizing it. Therefore, in order to improve the accuracy of texts, the copyists needed further education. Another advance that improved the accuracy of texts was the development of Carolingian miniscule, a clear and readable calligraphic script that serves as the basis for the Roman upper and lowercase script in use today.

This improvement of learning included the support of cathedral schools and schools attached to a cathedral church (a church where the bishop of a diocese – the basic geographic and administrative division of the Church – has his seat) as well as the establishment of new schools. These schools trained not only men and women from the church, but also the children of Frankish aristocrats, and in some cases women as well as men. As a result, an increasing number of Frankish nobles were literate or at least sponsored efforts by schools to further train people.

In order to further advance and diversify learning, Charlemagne invited a number of Irish, English, Italian, and Spanish Christian scholars to the palace school at Aachen in modern-day Germany. Here the scholars engaged in vigorous debates with the palace school’s students who included Charlemagne and his family and friends. Meanwhile, scriptoria through­out the empire launched a massive effort to copy new books. Many of these books were religious in character, although Carolingian monks, and nuns, would also copy books from Ancient Rome that were then adopted into the curriculum of schools in Western Europe.

The main school of Charlemagne’s empire was the school in his palace at Aachen. His palace itself was based on Roman and Byzantine architecture, as a demonstration that he possessed the same sort of legitimacy as the Roman Emperors. He then invited some of the best scholars of Western Europe to his court – including Alcuin of York (735 – 804), a monk from England – in order both to supervise his own court school and to direct the Church of the Frankish Empire to improve learning. Alcuin developed a curriculum  that emphasized study of core subjects that today provide the foundation for a liberal arts education.

Likewise, under the guidance of Charlemagne and the Frankish church, ancient books written by pagans, like the poetry of Virgil, would serve as the basis of the curriculum of Western Europe’s schools as they had within the Roman Empire. A Christian of the 8th century could believe that even works by pagans would nevertheless afford their readers education and, thus, self-improvement.

The impact of the Carolingian Renaissance was not only reflected in education, but also in the architectural projects undertaken by Charlemagne. The Palatine Chapel at Aachen not only provides an example of the adoption of Roman architectural styles by the Carolingians, but also serves as evidence of Charlemagne’s efforts to link his rule with the Roman Empire, in particular, the emperor Constantine. The chapel was built on a historic Roman site. The design of the Palatine Chapel shares a number of similarities with two preexisting Christian churches, the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (begun by Constantine’s mother) and San Vitale in Ravenna. Following the requirements of the Second Council of Nicaea, a relic associated with Saint Martin, a 4th century Roman soldier, was installed at the chapel.

Global Context

Although Charlemagne possessed one of the most powerful armies in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, state centralization in the empire lagged behind that of Tang China, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Byzantine Empire. Compared to the armies of the Byzantine Emperors, the Abbasid Caliphs, and above all, the Tang emperors, Charlemagne’s army was merely a very large war band, financed not by a state with a working system of taxation and treasury, but rather by the plunder of defeated enemies. Although he issued decrees known as capitularies through the agencies of Church and state, the realm had little in the way of either bureaucracy or infrastructure, save for the decaying network of the Roman Empire’s roads. Indeed, although Charlemagne had sought to have a canal dug between the Rhine and Danube rivers, this project failed – a fitting illustration of the gap between Charlemagneʻs ambitions and reality.

We should also note the global context of both the Carolingian and the Macedonian Renaissance. Carolingian and Macedonian Emperors were not the only ones seeking to increase the availability of ancient texts from the time of the Greeks and Romans. The Abbasid Caliphs under al-Mamun (r. 813–883 CE) and his successors also sponsored the work of the House of Wisdom, whose scholars translated the philosophy of the Ancient Greeks into Arabic. Like the Christians of the Carolingian and Byzantine Empires, the Muslims of the Caliphate believed that one could learn from pagan writers even if they had not believed in the one Creator God.

INVASIONS IN WESTERN EUROPE

Charlemagne’s efforts to create a unified empire did not long outlast Charlemagne himself. His son, Louis the Pious (r. 814–840 CE), succeeded him as emperor. Louis continued Charlemagne’s project of Church reform. Unfortunately, issues of succession plagued the Carolingians after Louis’s death. Unlike Charlemagne, who had only one son survive into adulthood, Louis had three. In addition, his eldest, Lothar, had already rebelled against him in the 830s CE. When Louis died, Lothar went to war with Louis’s other two sons, Charles the Bald and Louis the German. This civil war proved to be inconclusive, and, in the 843 CE Treaty of Verdun, the Carolingian Empire was divided among the brothers. This division of a kingdom was not unusual for a Germanic kingdom but it meant that there would be no restoration of a unified Empire in the West. However, Charlemagne’s impact was long-lasting and both the king of Francia and the rulers of Central Europe would each claim to be Charlemagne’s successors.

In addition to the civil war between the descendants of Charlemagne, Western Europe faced substantial challenges in the form of invasions. In the centuries following the rise of the post-Roman Germanic kingdoms, Western Europe had suffered comparatively few invasions. The 9th and 10th centuries, by contrast, were an “age of invasions.” The region of Scandinavia, in North Europe, was inhabited by a people called the Norse. These were Germanic peoples whose culture was not assimilated to the post-Roman world of the Carolingian West. They were still pagan and had a culture that, like that of other Germanic peoples, was quite warlike. By the 9th and 10th centuries, their population had increased. Warfare amongst the Norse resulted in the exile of the defeated. These Norsemen would often take up raiding other peoples; when they took up this activity, they were known as Vikings. One factor that allowed Norse raids on Western Europe was improvement in their ship construction. Their ships were long, flexible, and also had a shallow enough draft that they did not need harbors so could be pulled up along any beach. Moreover, they could sail up rivers for hundreds of miles. The unique features of these ships meant Norse Vikings could strike many different regions, often with very little warning.

Norse attacks were further facilitated by the fact that the states of Western Europe in the 9th and 10th centuries were relatively weak. The three successor kingdoms to Charlemagne’s empire were often split by civil war. Although King Charles the Bald (r. 843 – 877 CE) enjoyed some successes against the Vikings, his realm was subject to frequent raids. England’s small kingdoms were particularly vulnerable. From 793 CE, England suffered numerous Viking raids, and these raids increased in size and scope over the ninth century. Likewise, to the west, Ireland, with its chiefs and petty kings, lacked the organization of a state necessary to deal with sustained incursions.

To the east, the Norse sailed along the rivers that stretched through the forests and steppes of the area that today makes up Russia and Ukraine. The Slavic peoples living there had comparatively weak social organization, so in many instances, they fell under Norse domination. The Norsemen Rurik and Oleg were said to have established themselves as rulers of Slavic peoples as well as the princedoms of Novgorod and Kyiv, respectively, in the 9th century. These Slavic subjects living in these kingdoms under Norse rulers became known as the Rus.

Norse invaders were not the only threat faced by Western Europe. As the emirs of Muslim North Africa gradually broke away from the centralized rule of the Abbasid Caliphate, these emirs, particularly those of what is today Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco sought legitimacy through raid and plunder; this aggression was often directed at southern Francia and Italy. The Aghlabid emirs not only seized control of Sicily, but also sacked the city of Rome itself in 846 CE. North African raiders would often seize territory on the coasts of Southern Europe and raid European shipping in order to increase their own control of trade and commerce. In addition, the emirs of these North African states would use the plunder from their attacks to reward followers, in another example of the pillage and gift system.

Central Europe also faced attacks from the Magyars, a steppe people. The Magyars were forced out of Southeastern Europe by another steppe people, the Pechenegs, and from 899 CE migrated into Central Europe, threatening the integrity of East Francia. As was the case with other steppe peoples, their raids on horseback targeted people in small unfortified communities, avoiding larger settlements. They eventually settled in the plains of Eastern Europe to found the state of Hungary. Although the Magyars made Hungary their primary location, they continued to raid East Francia through the first part of the 10th century.

As a result of endemic chaos in Western Europe, the Church suffered as well. The moral and intellectual quality of bishops and abbots declined sharply, as church establishments fell under the domination of warlords. These warlords would often appoint members of their families or personal allies to positions of leadership in the Church, appointments based not on any competence, piety, or sense of dedication to duty, but rather on ties of loyalty. This was the case even in Rome, when families of Roman nobles fought over the papacy. Between 872 and 965 CE, twenty-four popes were assassinated in office.

An Age of Invasions in Perspective

Norse, Magyar, and Muslim attacks on Europe wrought incredible damage. Thousands died, and tens of thousands more were captured and sold into slavery in the great slave markets of North Africa and the Kievan Rus. These raids furthered the breakdown of public order in Western Europe. But these raids had effects that also brought long-term benefits. Both Norse and Muslim pirates traded just as much as they raided. Indeed, even the plunder of churches and selling of raided gold and silver helped create new trade networks in both the North Sea and Mediterranean. These new trade networks, especially where the Norse had established settlements in places like Ireland, gradually brought about an increase in economic activity. All told, this “age of invasions” can be remembered in terms both of its human cost and of the economic growth it brought about.

In response to the invasions that Europe faced, newer, stronger states came into being in the British Isles and in Central Europe. In England, Norse invasions destroyed all but one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The only remaining kingdom was Wessex. Its king, Alfred the Great (r. 871–899 CE), was able to stop Norse incursions by raising an army and navy financed by a kingdom-wide tax. This tax, known as the geld, was also used to finance the construction of a network of fortresses along the frontier of those parts of England still controlled by the Norse. This new system of tax collection would eventually mean that England, a small island on the periphery, would have the most sophisticated bureaucracy in Western Europe; we must note that in comparison with a Middle Eastern or East Asian state, this bureaucracy would be considered rudimentary and primitive.

Likewise, in Central Europe, the kings of East Francia, the region made up of those Saxon territories the Carolingians had conquered in the 8th century as well as various peoples to the south and east, gradually built a kingdom capable of dealing with Magyar invaders. Henry the Fowler (r. 919–936 CE) took control of East Francia after the end of the Carolingian Dynasty. He was succeeded by Otto the Great (r. 936–973 CE), whose creation of a state was partially the result of luck: his territory contained large silver mines that allowed him to finance an army. This army was able to decisively defeat the Magyar raiders and also allowed these kings to expand their power to the east, subjugating the Slavic peoples living in the forests of Eastern Europe.

Daily Life in Western Europe and the Byzantine Empires

In both Western Europe and Byzantium, the vast majority of the population was made up of farmers. In Western Europe, some of these were what we call dependent farmers, living on the lands of aristocrats and giving over much of their surplus to their landlords. But in many villages, the majority of farmers were small independent landowners and may have enjoyed some form of self-government. Although some slavery existed especially in zones of conflict like the Mediterranean, compared to the days when vast estates had been worked by unfree labor, workers on the estates of the Frankish aristocracy or independent farmers enjoyed greater freedom than their Roman counterparts. But their life was precarious. Crop yields were low, at ratios of around 3:1, meaning only giving back about three times as much as was planted.  The average Carolingian farmer frequently did not get adequate calories.  So too did most of the population of the Byzantine Empire live in small villages, living at a subsistence level, and selling what rare surplus they had. Byzantium, like its Western European counterpart, was fundamentally rural.

The nobles of Western Europe were generally part of a warrior aristocracy. These aristocrats often outfitted and equipped themselves based on the wealth of their lands. Their values were those of service to their king, and loyalty and bravery in battle. Nobles would often not live on their lands but follow the royal court, which would itself travel from place to place rather than having a fixed location. Battle may have been frequent, but until Charlemagne, the scale of battle was often small, with armies numbering a few hundred at most.

Along with its warrior aristocracy, gender roles in the Frankish kingdom, like those of the Roman Empire that came before it, reflected a patriarchal society. The Christian religion generally taught that wives were to submit to their husbands, and the men who wrote the majority of the religious texts often thought of women as weak and as temptations to sexual sin. “You,” an early Christian writer had exclaimed of women, “are the devil’s gateway…you are the first deserter of the divine law…you destroyed so easily God’s image, man…” (Christian Classics Ethereal Library). The warlike values of the aristocracy meant that aristocratic women were relegated to a supporting role, to the management of the household. Both Roman and Germanic law placed women in subordination to their fathers and then, when married, to their husbands.

That said, women did enjoy certain rights. Although legally inferior to men in Roman Law (practiced in the Byzantine Empire and often among those peoples who were subjects of the Germanic aristocracies), a wife maintained the right to any property she brought into a marriage. Women often played a strong economic role in peasant life, and, as with their aristocratic counterparts, peasant women often managed the household while men performed physical tasks such as plowing. The Church gave women a fair degree of autonomy in certain circumstances. We often read of women choosing to become nuns, to take vows of celibacy, against the desires of their families for them to marry. These women, if they framed their choices in terms of Christian devotion, could often count on institutional support for their life choices. Although monasticism was usually limited to noblewomen, women who became nuns often had access to an education. Certain noble­women who became abbesses could even become powerful political actors in their own right, as did Gertrude of Nivelles (c. 621 – 659 CE), abbess of the monastery of Nivelles in what is today Belgium.

THE EMERGENCE OF A FEUDAL ORDER IN WESTERN EUROPE

Out of the chaos and mayhem of the 10th and 11th centuries, East Francia, the eastern third of Charlemagne’s Empire in roughly the same place as modern Germany, and England had emerged as united and powerful states. In the aftermath of the Abbasid Caliphate’s political collapse and the gradual weakening of Fatimid Egypt, the 11th-century Byzantine Empire was the strongest, most centralized state in the Eastern Mediterranean, and indeed, probably the strongest state west of Song China.

Most of the rest of Christian Western Europe’s kingdoms were fragmented. This decentralization was most acute in West Francia, the western third of what had been Charlemagne’s empire. This kingdom would eventually come to be known as France. Out of a weak and fragmented kingdom emerged the decentralized form of government that historians often call feudalism. We call it feudalism because power rested with armed men in control of plots of agricultural land known as fiefs and Latin for fief is feudum. They would use the surplus from these fiefs to equip themselves with weapons and equipment, and they often controlled their fiefs with little oversight from the higher-ranked nobles or the king.

As a result of constant warfare (albeit warfare that was usually local in scope), power came to rest in control of fiefs and the ability to extract surplus from their occupants and to use this surplus to outfit armed men. The warlords who controlled fiefs often did so by means of armed fortresses called castles. At first, especially in northern parts of West Francia, these fortresses were constructed out of wood, and were occasionally as simple as a wooden palisade surrounding a fortified wooden tower. Over the 11th and 12th centuries, these wooden castles were replaced with stone fortifications. A castle had two roles: it protected land from attackers (such as Viking raiders) and also served as a base for the control and extortion of a land’s people.

In addition to its stone walls, the castle was protected by knights. Knights in the 11th century wore armor called chain mail, that is, interlocking rings of metal that would form a coat of armor. The knight usually fought on horseback, wielding a long spear known as a lance in addition to the sword at his side. With his feet resting in stirrups, a knight could hold himself firmly in the saddle, directing the weight and power of a charging horse into the tip of his lance. Mounted on horseback, knights were mobile enough that they could respond rapidly to raids. The castle enabled a small number of soldiers to defend territory and was also a deterrent to raiders, since it meant that quick plunder might not be possible.

A knight’s equipment – mail, lance, and horse – was incredibly expensive, as was the material and labor to construct even a wooden castle. Although knights had originally been whichever soldiers had been able to get the equipment to fight, the expense of this equipment and thus the need to control a fief to pay for it meant that knights gradually became a warrior aristocracy, with greater rights than the peasants whose labor they controlled. Indeed, often the rise of knights and castles meant that many peasants lost their freedom, becoming serfs, unfree peasants who, although not property that could be bought and sold like slaves, were nevertheless bound to their land and subordinate to those who controlled it.

The regions of West Francia controlled by powerful nobles were nearly independent of the crown. The kingdom of West Francia (and other regions of Western Europe where such a system held sway) had little cohesion as a state, with most functions of a state like minting money, building roads and bridges, and trying and executing criminals in the hands of the powerful nobles. But even at the Frankish monarchy’s weakest, these nearly independent nobles were understood to hold their territories through the king and owed allegiance to him if he called on them for military service. In this way, feudalism of the European Middle Ages resembled Western Zhou feudalism. The smaller fiefs that made up the territories of these great nobles likewise were understood to be held from these nobles. The knight who held a fief was, at least in theory, required to render military service to the lord from whom he held it.

During a time of constant violence and little organized state protection against bandits, seabourne invaders, or aggressive military action, security was of utmost concern to peasants who comprised the majority of the population. Due to the weakness of the monarchy, peasants turned to the nearest feudal lord and his knights for protection. Vulnerable peoples and any land they may have independently owned, were absorbed into defended estates. To achieve this protection, they had to accept terms laid down by the feudal lord. In return for protection provided by the feudal lord and his army, peasants gave up all chance of economic betterment and virtually all freedoms. Free workers, such as craftspeople, would commit their labor and surpluses to a feudal lord or vassal in return for protection. Peasants who owned land had their farms absorbed into the lord’s manor; they retained land ownership but gave up control and profits from that land to the feudal lord in return for protection. Over time, some peasants even gave up freedom of movement by becoming serfs in return for the right to live in a protected area. In addition to freedom of movement, serfs lost other rights including the ability to marry or change occupation without the explicit permission of their lord.

The agricultural working classes, composed of both freedpersons and serfs, found it impossible to accumulate wealth and for centuries remained in poverty. What peasants and serfs did receive was protection from the lord’s army and the right to run behind protective castle walls. To achieve a minimal level of stability, millions of people endured egregious repression, impoverishment and exploitation. It took centuries for those in the agricultural laboring classes to break free of social and economic stratifications created during the Medieval Period. Strong remnants of resulting class differences still exist in Europe today.

Global Context 

Thus far, we have discussed feudalism in 11th-century Western Europe, but a decentralized state dominated by a warrior aristocracy could emerge anywhere that central authority broke down. A similar system emerged in Heian Japan during the 12th and 13th centuries, when mounted soldiers (in this case samurai rather than knights) came to occupy the social role of a warrior aristocracy. Such an arrangement would emerge at the same time in the Middle East. The Great Saljuq Empire was dominated by mounted warriors in control of iqtas, units of land whose revenues (often from taxation) would fund these warriors, who in turn held their iqtas from the sultan.

Growth of Towns and Trade 

Although the 11th century was in many ways Western Europe’s nadir, it would also see the beginnings of Western Europe’s re-urbanization. One reason for these beginnings was that in lands that had been part of the Western Roman Empire, city walls often remained, even if these cities had largely emptied of people. During the chaos and mayhem of the 10th and 11th centuries, people often gathered in walled settlements for protection. Many of these old walled cities thus came to be re-occupied.

Another reason for the growth of towns came with a revival of trade in the 11th century. This revival of trade can be traced to several causes. In the first place, Europe’s knights, as a warrior aristocracy, had a strong demand for luxury goods, both locally manufactured products and imported goods such as silks and spices from Asia. Bishops, the great lords of the Church, had a similar demand. As such, markets grew up in the vicinity of castles and became the basis of bustling towns. Cathedral cities also experienced population growth. Moreover, Viking raids led to a greater sea-borne trade in the North Sea and Atlantic. Often, Viking-founded markets served as the nucleus of new towns, especially in those lands where the Romans had never established a state and which were not urbanized at all. The Irish city of Dublin, for example, began as a Viking trading post.

Further south, in the Mediterranean, frequent raids by pirates (most of whom were Arab Muslims from North Africa) forced the coastal cities of Italy to build effective navies. Chief among these cities was Venice, a city in the swamps and lagoons of northeastern Italy. Over the 11th century, the city (formerly under Byzantine rule but now independent) built up a navy that cleared the Adriatic Sea of pirates and established itself as a nexus of trade between Constantinople and the rest of Western Europe. Likewise, on the western side of Italy, the cities of Genoa and Pisa both built navies and seized the Muslim pirate strongholds in the islands of Corsica and Sardinia. Efforts to clear pirates out of the Mediterranean led to an increase in maritime trade and facilitatied the renewed growth of old Roman towns. The cities of Genoa and Venice were further able to prosper thanks to their location at the northernmost points of the Mediterranean, the farthest that goods could be moved by water before going over land to points further north. During this time seabourne travel and trade was cheaper than overland transport and Venice and Genoa were able to capitalize on their proximity to the water.

As goods moved north and south between the trade zones of the North Sea and the Mediterranean, nobles along that north-south route realized that they could enrich themselves by taxing markets. They sponsored and protected markets in regions of West Francia, like Champagne, which served as centers of urbanization and economic activity. The people living and working in towns came to be known as the bourgeois, or middle class. These were called a middle class because they were neither peasant farmers nor nobles, but rather a social rank between the two. Kings and other nobles would frequently give towns the right to self-government, often in exchange for a hefty payment. A self-governing town was often known as a commune.

Growth in Agriculture

Despite urbanization, 11th century Europe’s economy remained primarily agricultural. In fact, the 11th and 12th centuries saw a massive expansion of agricultural output in the northern regions of Europe, which led to a corresponding growth in the economy and population. The same improvement in iron technology that allowed the equipping of armored knights led to more iron tools: axes allowed farmers to clear forests and cultivate more land, and the iron share of a heavy plow allowed farmers to plow deeper into the thick soil of Western Europe. In addition, farmers gradually moved to a so-called 3 field system of agriculture: fields would have one third given over to cereal crops, one third to crops such as legumes, which increase fertility in soil, and a third left fallow, i.e., uncultivated either to serve as grazing land for livestock or simply rebuild its nutrients by lying unused. More iron tools and new agricultural techniques caused yields to rise from 3:1 to nearly 8:1 and in some fertile regions even higher.

Another factor in the rise of agricultural yields was Europe’s climate, which was becoming warmer in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. As a result of both climate and new agricultural tools and techniques, food supplies increased so that Western Europe avoided major famine during the 12th century. We should note that at the same time that agricultural yields were rising in Europe, so too were they on the rise in Song China. Indeed, compared to China, Europe’s agricultural production was still relatively meager. It was nevertheless enough to bring about a dramatic growth in Europe’s population.

Political Developments in Central and Northern Europe

As the Carolingian Empire collapsed in the 9th century and West Francia remained fragmented, in Central Europe, the rulers of East Francia formed a new empire on the wreck of Charlemagne’s. King Otto I of East Francia defeated the Magyars in 955 CE, and both Otto and his powerful nobles further subordinated the Slavic peoples to the east to his rule, forcing them either to submit to his direct rule or acknowledge him as their overlord. He followed up on the prestige gained from his victory over the Magyars by exercising influence in Northern Italy, intervening in a dispute between Pope John XII (r. 955–964 CE) and Berengar, a petty king. On February 2nd, 962 CE, Pope John XII crowned Otto as Roman Emperor in a ceremony meant to echo Pope Leo III’s crowning of Charlemagne over a century and a half before. Further, Otto deposed Berengar and added Italy to his domains.

The rulers of this empire called themselves Roman Emperors and considered themselves the successors to Charlemagne and thus to the Roman Empire. This empire, however, was more modest than Charlemagne’s. Although its emperors claimed that all Christian kings owed them obedience, most other realms of Western Europe were independent, especially West Francia (which we shall hereafter refer to as France). Likewise, this empire’s control of Northern Italy was always somewhat tenuous, since its rulers’ power was based in Germany, far to the north of the Alps. Because these emperors considered themselves to be Roman Emperors and also protectors of the Church. Historians call their empire the Holy Roman Empire and its emperors Holy Roman Emperors. The reader should carefully note that these emperors did not use either of those titles. They simply referred to themselves as Roman Emperors and their empire as the Roman Empire.

Far to the north, in Norway, a land of narrow fjords and valleys surrounded by pine-covered mountains, King Olaf II followed a similar set of policies. A Christian who had converted in 1013 CE while fighting in France, he spent his reign as king of Norway (1015–1030 CE) both consolidating Norway into a kingdom that recognized royal authority and converting that kingdom to Christianity.

Expansion of Christendom

In the Medieval Period, the people of Western Europe did not think of Europe as a geographic and cultural area. Rather, they thought of their homes as part of Christendom, those peoples and nations of the world that embraced the Christian religion, as a community sharing common ideals and assumptions. We might compare it to the Muslim notion of Dar al-Islam. And in the 11th century, Christendom expanded. Not only had the peoples to the north and east embraced Christianity, but also Christian peoples and kingdoms in the Western Mediterranean expanded militarily at the expense of Islam. In Spain, the efforts of Christian kingdoms in northern Spain to expand their territory and diminish Muslim al-Andalus came to be known as the Reconquista, the reconquest. It was known as the re-conquest because there had been a Christian kingdom in Spain in the 6th and 7th centuries that had fallen to Muslim invaders in 711 CE. Christians thus assumed that Spain, even though much of it was Muslim-ruled, was rightfully Christian. The effort by the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula to dominate, conquer, and re-Christianize al-Andalus would become a key element in how Spanish Christians understood their identity both as Christians and Spaniards.

In Southern Italy, a group of knights from the region of France known as Normandy (and who were thus called Normans) fought in the employ of the Byzantine emperors against the Muslim rulers of North Africa and Sicily. They eventually broke with the Byzantine Emperors and created the Kingdom of Sicily, a kingdom comprising Sicily and Southern Italy, the lands that they seized from both the Byzantines and Sicilian Muslims, with the last Muslim territory in Sicily conquered in 1091 CE. These knights too had come south to the Mediterranean in search of new lands. These victories by Christian forces over Muslims would be of great interest to the popes, who were seeking to reform the Church and to find ways that knights could be made to serve Christian society.

The Christian kingdoms of both Spain and Sicily were relatively tolerant of their Muslim subjects. Although Muslims under Christian rule faced civil disabilities similar to the dhimmi status of Jews and Christians in Muslim-ruled lands, they had a broad array of rights and protections. Indeed, the Christian kings of Sicily often employed Muslim mercenaries in their military service.

Church Reform in the 11th Century

By the 11th century, Europe suffered from frequent violence and the Church itself was in a sorry state: Pope John XII, for example, the man who had crowned Otto I, was so infamous for his immorality that it was said that under his rule the papal palace (called the Lateran) was little better than a brothel. From the mid-11th century, both popes and other clergymen sought to reform both the institutional structures of the Church and Christian society as a whole.

The Holy Roman Emperor Henry III (r. 1039–1056 CE) set the movement to reform the papacy into motion. In 1049C E, he traveled to Rome to be crowned emperor. When he arrived in the city, he found three men claiming to be pope, each supported by a family of Roman nobles. The outraged emperor deposed all three and replaced them with his own candidate, Pope Leo IX (r. 1049–1054 CE). Leo IX then ushered in a period in which reformers dominated the papacy.

These popes believed that to reform the Church, they would need to do so as its unquestioned leaders and that the institutional Church should be independent from control of laypeople. The position of pope had long been a prestigious one: Peter, the chief of Jesus Christ’s disciples had, according to the Christian tradition, been the first bishop of Rome, the city in which he had been killed. 11th century popes increasingly argued that since Peter had been the chief of Jesus’s followers (and thus the first pope), the whole Church owed the popes the obedience that the disciples had owed Peter, who himself had been given his authority by Christ.

Such a position was in many ways revolutionary. In the Byzantine Empire, the emperors often directed the affairs of the Church. These efforts often resulted in uneven outcomes, for example, the Iconoclast Controversy. Western European kings appointed bishops, and the Holy Roman Emperors believed that they had the right to both appoint and depose popes. To claim the Church was independent of lay control went against centuries of practice. Moreover, not all churchmen recognized the absolute authority of the pope. The pope was one of five churchmen traditionally known as patriarchs, the highest-ranking bishops of the Church. The pope was the patriarch of Rome; the other four were the patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. With Jerusalem and Alexandria (and often Antioch) under Muslim rule, the patriarch of Constantinople was the most prestigious of the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs, dwelling in a city that was Rome’s successor. The patriarchs of Constantinople believed that the Roman pope had a place of honor because Peter had resided in Rome, but they did not believe he had any authority over other patriarchs. Differences over authority and interpretation of key doctrines ultimately led to a formal split between the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church as officials in each excommunicated each other. This split is referred to as the Great Schism.

Simony and the Investiture Controversy

In spite of the schism between Catholic and Orthodox Churches, the popes turned to reforming the Church in the Catholic west. Two pressing concerns of the popes were the elimination of simony, the buying and selling of Church offices, and the protection of the Church’s independence from laypeople. The fight of the reforming popes to assert the Church’s independence led to the Investiture Controversy, the conflict between the popes and Holy Roman Emperors (and other kings of Western Europe) over who had the right to appoint churchmen.

To understand the Investiture Controversy, it is necessary to understand the nature of a medieval bishop’s power and authority. A bishop in medieval Europe was a Church leader, with a cathedral church and a palace. A medieval bishop would also hold lands with fiefs on these lands (and military obligations from those who held these fiefs), just like any great noble.

The Holy Roman Emperors believed that they had the right to appoint bishops both because a bishop held lands from the emperor and because the emperors believed themselves to be the leaders of all Christendom. The reforming popes of the 11th century, particularly Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073 – 1085 CE), objected to this belief. These popes believed that, since their authority as popes came from God, their spiritual authority was superior to the earthly authority of any king or prince. They further claimed their right to be independent rulers of the Papal States in Central Italy, based on the Donation of Constantine.

Gregory VII was up against a man just as strong-willed as he in the person of Emperor Henry IV (r. 1056–1106 CE). From 1075 CE, their relationship became increasingly adversarial as each claimed the exclusive right to appoint and depose bishops. Eventually, this conflict burst into open flame when Henry claimed that Gregory was in fact not rightfully pope at all and attempted to appoint his own pope. In response, Gregory proclaimed that none of Henry’s subjects had a duty to obey him and encouraged his subjects to rise in rebellion. Without the Church to legitimize Henry IV, his empire collapsed into civil war. As a result, Henry took a small band of followers and, in the dead of winter, crossed the Alps, braving the snowy, ice-covered passes to negotiate with the pope in person. In January, he approached the mountain castle of Canossa where the pope was staying and begged Gregory for forgiveness, waiting outside of  the pope’s castle on his knees in the snow for three days. Finally, Pope Gregory forgave the emperor.

In the end, however, after a public ceremony of reconciliation, Henry returned to Central Europe, crushed the rebellion, and then returned to Italy with an army, forcing Gregory VII into exile. This Investiture Controversy dragged on for another four decades. In the end, the Holy Roman Emperors and popes reached a compromise with the 1122 CE Concordat of Worms. The compromise was that clergy would choose bishops, but that the emperor could decide disputed elections. A bishop would receive his lands from the emperor in one ceremony, and the emblems of his spiritual authority from the pope in another. Other kings of Western Europe reached similar compromises with the papacy.

The results of half a century of papal reform efforts were mixed. The Catholic and Orthodox Churches had split with one another, and tensions remain between the two to this day. Although the popes failed to achieve everything they sought, they did gain limited independence of the Church, and they succeeded almost completely in ending the practice of simony. Indeed, one contrast between Western Europe and much of the rest of the world is a strong sense of separation between secular and sacred authority. That separation of Church and state owes much to the troubled years of the Investiture Controversy. The successes of the papacy in their efforts at Church reform, together with the military successes seen by Christians in the Western Mediterranean against Muslims, would inspire the popes to an even more ambitious effort: the Crusades.

THE CRUSADES

The First Crusade

By the 11th century, despite outward appearances of strength, exemplified by the glories of the capital Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire was experiencing a number of threats that included bureaucratic breakdown, decline in military effectiveness, and the advance of Seljuk Turks from the East. Eventually, Alexios Komnenos (r. 1081–1118 CE), a militarily gifted member of the Byzantine nobility, seized control of the Byzantine Empire and laboriously rebuilt its military strength. Alexios was an able and clever military commander who also possessed good long-term sense. He used the tax base of the Empire’s Balkan possessions to fund a new army, one composed largely of foreign mercenaries and a small core of Greek soldiers. These indigenous soldiers were often granted blocks of lands known as pronoiai (singular pronoia) whose revenues they would use to equip themselves and their soldiers; a pronoia was similar to a fief in Western Europe. He also recruited steppe peoples, such as the Cumans and Pechenegs, into his forces. Another group of peoples from which he recruited mercenaries was Western Europeans, particularly from the Holy Roman Empire and West Francia. In March of 1095, he sent a request to the pope for military assistance. The long-term consequences of this request would be earth-shaking.

The pope who received Alexios Komnenos’s request for help was Urban II (r. 1088–1099 CE), an associate of reformers like Gregory VII. Churchmen seeking to reform society looked to quell the outbursts of violence that were frequent in Western Europe (especially in France): this violence was usually the work of knights. Fighting against Muslims in Sicily and Spain showed the popes the possibilities of directing the aggression of the knights against Christendom’s external enemies. In addition, the Church had long recognized Roman Law’s concept of Just War: a war could be moral as long as it was defensive, declared by a rightful authority, and likely to cause less damage than if the war had not occurred. By the 11th century, certain churchmen had extrapolated this idea into one of Holy War, that is to say, that a war fought in defense of the Church was not only morally right, but even meritorious.

The final element that led to Pope Urban II’s declaration of the First Crusade was the idea of Jerusalem. The city of Jerusalem was of great religious significance within the Christian world and was home of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on what was said to be the empty tomb from which Christ had risen. The importance of the city meant that it was a popular destination for Christian pilgrims. However, Jerusalem, and thus the church, had been under the control of Muslims since Caliph Umar’s conquest of Palestine in the 7th century.

Pope Urban thus conceived of the idea of directing the military force of Western Europe to both shore up the strength of the flagging Byzantine Empire (a Christian state), and return Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to Christian rule. On November 27th, 1095 CE, he gathered several of the major nobles and many lower-ranked knights for a sermon. In this sermon, he proclaimed that it was the duty of these warrior aristocrats, as Christians, to defend the Byzantine Empire and to return the city of Jerusalem to Christian rule. The result was an enthusiastic response by the attendees, who are said to have cried out, “God wills it!” and vowed to set off to Jerusalem. Furthermore, as word of Pope Urban’s admonition spread throughout Western Europe, more and more of the knightly class answered the call, mustering under the leadership of several powerful nobles.

This movement of the knights of most of Western Europe to fight against Muslims in the Middle East is generally known as the first of a series of Crusades. A crusade was a war declared by the papacy against those perceived to be enemies of the Christian faith (usually, but not always, Muslims). Participating in a crusade would grant a Christian forgiveness of sins.m As these forces mustered and marched south and east, the religious enthusiasm accompanying them often spilled out into aggression against non-Christians other than Muslims. One group of Crusaders in the area around the Rhine engaged in a series of massacres of Jewish civilians, traveling from city to city while killing Jews and looting their possessions before this armed gang was forced to disperse.

The Crusaders traveled in two main waves. The first wave traveled to the Byzantine Empire and was ferried across the Bosporus but was wiped out by a Turkish army. The second wave, however, was better planned and coordinated, and, upon its arrival in the Byzantine Empire, reached an uneasy truce with Alexios Komnenos, who had been expecting a modest force of mercenaries and not the armed might of most of Western Europe.

The Crusaders moved east, winning a string of victories in Asia Minor. When they could not be outmaneuvered, the armored knights of Western Europe often stood at an advantage against the lightly armored or unarmored mounted archers that mostly made up the bulk of Turkish forces. Following the path of the crusading army, Alexios was able to restore much of western Asia Minor to the control of the Byzantine Empire, although the central Anatolian plateau would remain under the dominion of the Saljuq Turks. The Crusaders advanced on Antioch, the largest and most prosperous city of the Levant, and, after a siege of nearly a year, seized control of the city and defeated a Turkish army that attempted to relieve it. The army then marched south to Jerusalem and into territory controlled by the Fatimid caliphate, itself a Shi’ite state that was no friend of the Sunni Saljuq Turks. The Crusaders stormed the city’s walls, and, as the city fell, it was subject to a brutal sack, with both the city’s defenders and its civilian population subject to a bloody slaughter.

After the fall of Jerusalem, the Crusaders established four states in the Levant: the County of Edessa, in northern Mesopotamia, the Principality of Antioch, centered on the city of Antioch and its environs; the County of Tripoli, in what is roughly Lebanon today; and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which occupied Palestine and whose capital was the city of Jerusalem. These states were ruled by men (and often women) who were Catholic in religion and ethnically Western European. The religion and institutions of these Crusader States were nearly the same as those of Western Europe.

These states attracted some settlers, including members of the warrior aristocracy and even merchants and peasants. But many of the subjects of the Christian rulers of these kingdoms were Muslims or Christian Arabs. Christian Arabs had special privileges over their Muslim counterparts, but fewer rights than Catholic, ethnically Western European Christians. Indeed, the Crusader States consistently suffered from a lack of manpower. Although the pope had spoken of rich lands for the taking in Palestine, most of the knights who had gone on the First Crusade (and survived) returned to Western Europe. The Crusader States relied on extensive networks of heavily fortified stone castles for defense.

The Crusader States endured from 1099 to 1187 CE because the Muslim Middle East was politically fragmented. But in 1187 CE, Salah al-Din (Saladin), sultan of Egypt and Syria, defeated knights defending the Kingdom of Jerusalem, establishing his control over this coveted city. In response to a papal bull calling for continued attacks on Muslim forces and the retaking of Jerusalem, a number of crusades were declared until the 15th century. None of these expeditions were successful in taking Jerusalem, some simply degenerated into marauding and looting of cities on the path to the holy lands

THE TWELFTH CENTURY IN WESTERN EUROPE

In the 12th century, many of Europe’s kingdoms saw a gradual centralization of state power. England had long been Western Europe’s most centralized state. In 1066 CE, a group of Normans under their Duke, William the Bastard, invaded England. William defeated the English army, making himself the king of England: he was thereafter known as William the Conqueror. This conquest of England by French-speakers moved the culture, language, and institutions of England closer to those of France. However, England continued to retain its centralized bureaucratic apparatus. William was able to use this bureaucracy to conduct a nationwide census, a feat of which no European state outside of the Byzantine Empire was capable. Although England would suffer a civil war of nearly a decade and a half in the 12th century, for the most part, its monarchs, particularly Henry I (r. 1100–1135 CE) and Henry II (r. 1154–1189 CE), were innovative and clever administrators, creating a network of royal courts and a sophisticated office of tax collection known as the Exchequer.

France entered the 10th and 11th centuries as the most loosely-governed kingdom of Europe. In 987 CE, France’s nobles elected Hugh Capet, the count of Paris, as king, effectively replacing the Carolingian dynasty. The Capetian Dynasty’s kings, however, directly controlled only the lands around Paris. In addition, after the Norman conquest of England in 1066 CE, the Norman kings of England were also dukes of large French territories. Thus, for the first part of the 12th century, much of France was under the effective control of the English crown. In spite of these challenges, the Capetian monarchs gradually built their kingdom into a functional state. They cultivated a reputation as defenders of Christianity in order to gain legitimacy from the Church. They also sought to enforce the feudal obligations that the powerful nobles owed to the crown, often calling on them to serve militarily so as to create a habit of obedience to the king.

To the southwest, the rise of the Muslim Almoravid Empire under the rule of aggressively expansionist Muslim religious reformers in North Africa briefly put the Reconquista in jeopardy. But by the early 12th century, it had resumed, with the Muslim stronghold of Zaragoza falling to Christian armies in 1118 CE. After the First Crusade, those knights who traveled to Spain to help its Christian kings fight Muslims received the same forgiveness of sins that the papacy granted to crusaders in the Levant. Over the 12th century, four major Christian kingdoms emerged in the Iberian Peninsula: Portugal, Leon-Castile, Navarre, and Aragon. These kingdoms developed a sophisticated system of taxation to fund the Reconquista. In the later 12th century, they faced the challenge of the Almohad Empire that emerged from the Islamic Maghreb to unite Muslim Spain and North Africa. By the 1150s, Christian Spain was on the defensive once again.

THE TWELFTH CENTURY RENAISSANCE

The 12th century in Western Europe was a time of renewed vibrancy in intellectual activity, and much of this activity centered on Europe’s towns and cities. We call this renewal of intellectual activity the 12th Century Renaissance, to separate it from both the Carolingian Renaissance of the 8th and 9th centuries, and the Italian Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries. Over the 11th century, thinkers in the monasteries of Western Europe increasingly sought to apply the tools of logic (in particular Aristotelian logic) to the study of the Bible. But Western Europeans were familiar with very little of Aristotle’s work aside from a small number of logical writings that had been translated from Greek into Latin in the 6th century. During the 12th century there was an immense growth of interest in philosophy on the part of those men (and a few women) who had a formal education. Islamic influences were important in promoting these developments. As early as the 10th century, Christian scholars visited Muslim-ruled Spain to read the works of ancient Greek thinkers that were unavailable elsewhere in Western Europe. When Toledo fell to Christian armies in 1085 CE, its libraries became available to the larger Christian world.

Muslims had translated most of the philosophy of Aristotle into Arabic, in addition to writing extensive original works that engaged with the thoughts of Aristotle and Plato. Once these books were in Christian hands, Raymond, archbishop of Toledo (r. 1125–1152 CE), set up translation teams. People who spoke Arabic and the Romance languages of Spain would first translate these books into Spanish, and these books would then be translated into Latin, which made Aristotle and Ptolemy, as well as the works of Arabic philosophers, available to educated people throughout Western Europe. The availability of texts that had been largely known only by reputation to the thinkers of Western Europe spurred an intellectual revolution as Christian scholars sought to understand how to reconcile an understanding of the world based on Christianity with the approach of the non-Christian ancient Greeks. Translation work continued through the 12th and 13th centuries. This movement saw the translation not only of philosophy, but also of medicine. Medical texts were read avidly by Christians in Western Europe.

Philosophy and medicine were not the only fields of study to receive new interest. Western Europeans also showed a renewed interest in law. Although the kingdoms that had grown up in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire had incorporated some elements of Roman Law, as well as the oral law of the Germanic peoples, into their legal systems, law codes were for the most part unsystematic. Starting in the 11th century, scholars, particularly those based in the schools of Bologna, began subjecting the Justinian Code to intense study, using logical analysis to create a body of systematic writing on the interpretation of law. These men who studied Roman Law would often work for kings and emperors, and as a result much European law drew its inspiration from Justinian’s Code.

Most schools were still attached to cathedral churches; indeed, these schools in which medicine, law, and philosophy flourished as disciplines of study might be compared to the madrassas of the Muslim world. The chief field of study in these schools continued to be theology, that is, the interpretation of the Bible. And theologians increasingly drew on logical analysis and philosophy of language to understand what they believed was God’s revelation to humanity.

Eventually, many of these cathedral schools gained the right to organize as self-governing institutions. We call these institutions universities. By the end of the 12th century, the universities of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford had become self-governing institutions and became the foundation of the university system of the Western world that exists to the present day.

Daily Life at the Medieval Zenith

Even at the height of medieval Europe’s prosperity, most people were peasant farmers, living like their ancestors in the Carolingian or Byzantine Empires. They often lived in villages in one- or two-room houses with separate space for livestock. Only the richest of peasants – and some free peasants did prosper – could afford a bed. Most people slept in straw. The furniture in a peasant household might be at most a table and stool. The peasant diet was mainly grain, both bread and porridge, and peasants got their protein from both legumes and eggs. The occasional meat came from chickens, those sheep that were too old for shearing, and sometimes pigs. Beef was reserved for nobles.

Nobles often lived in large rural houses. They were sometimes attached to castles, but many castles were unoccupied in times of peace. The noble diet was heavy in meat; indeed, nobles often suffered from gout, a painful swelling of the joints from too much meat in the diet. Meat dishes were lavishly cooked in spices such as cardamom, cinnamon, cumin, pepper, and saffron. Peasant recreation might include ball games, wrestling, and, of course, drinking. Beer was the most popular drink in northern Europe, while in southern Europe people drank wine. The best quality wines were a luxury, with nobles throughout Europe drinking the wines of Italy and southern France.

Noble recreation included chess, introduced from the Muslim world around the 11th century, hunting (usually forbidden to peasants), and the tournament. During tournaments knights would form into teams and fight each other, sometimes with blunted weapons, but sometimes with regular weapons, relying on their armor to protect them. Accidental fatalities in hunting and tournaments were common.

Europe’s growing cities had narrow, unpaved streets with pools of waste through which pigs, dogs, and other animals would wander. Paris, whose streets King Philip Augustus ordered paved and lined with ditches to carry away waste water, was the exception rather than the rule. Likewise, although London had a network of pipes to carry water from springs by 1236 CE, the inhabitants of most cities pulled water from wells, and these were often contaminated. Indeed, diseases from parasites and contaminated water meant that cities were population sinks, with more people dying than were born. Population increase in cities was in part due to migration from rural areas. By the 12th century, most towns of Western Europe recognized a runaway serf as legally free if he or she had resided within the walls of a town for a year and a day.

Medieval Europe remained a patriarchal culture. The division of labor in peasant, middle-class, and noble households, however, meant that women played an active part in economic life. Female peasants would often labor alongside men in the fields, and women often ran taverns. Likewise, among nobles, women usually managed the household and might direct the economic activity of the great agricultural estates.

Within the church, women could be nuns but could not be ordained as clergy. Legally women remained subordinate to their husbands. And even though nobles increasingly read love poetry that placed women in a position of honor and devotion, this very devotion emphasized the woman as a prize to be sought after rather than as a partner.

Scholasticism

As more and more works of ancient Greek and Muslim philosophy became available to Western European Christians, the question of how to understand the world acquired more urgency. The philosophers of the ancient Greek and Muslim worlds were known to have produced much useful knowledge. But they had not been Christians. How, asked many thinkers, were Christians to understand the world: through divine revelation, as it appeared in the Bible, or through the human reason of philosophers? Indeed, this question was reminiscent of similar questions taking place in the Islamic world, when thinkers such as al-Ghazali questioned how useful the tools of logic and philosophy were in understanding the Quran. Out of these debates, medieval Europe produced its greatest thinker, St. Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274 CE). St. Thomas was a Dominican friar. Friars spent much of their time preaching to laypeople in Europe’s growing towns and cities. These friars, whose two major groups were the Franciscans and Dominicans, had schools in most major universities of Western Europe by the early 13th century. Aquinas, a philosopher in the Dominican school of the University of Paris, argued that human reason and divine revelation were in perfect harmony. He did so based on the techniques of the disputed question. He would raise a point, raise its objection, then provide an answer, and this answer would always be based on a logical argument. Aquinas was part of a larger movement, called scholasticism, in the universities of Western Europe to reconcile Christian theology with human reason through the use of logic.

Aquinas and the scholastics can be compared to Zhu Xi and the neo-Confucians of Song China. Just as Zhu Xi had sought to integrate Confucian thought with Buddhist and Daoist philosophy, so too did Aquinas seek to integrate both Aristotelian logic and Christian theology. The period not only saw successes in the field of speculative philosophy and theology but also in the practical application of science. The master masons who designed Western Europe’s castles and cathedral churches built hundreds of soaring cathedrals that would be the tallest buildings in Europe until the 19th century. We call the architecture of these cathedrals Gothic. Gothic cathedrals were well known for their use of pointed arches that made possible construction of taller buildings and for stained-glass windows that admitted a dazzling array of light. These cathedrals were in many ways enabled by the prosperity of Europe’s towns, whose governing councils often financed the construction of these magnificent churches.

Environment in History – Medieval Cities and Pollution

Question to answer:

• What factors contributed to air and water pollution in London?

One of the distinct developments that occurred during the Medieval Period in Europe was reurbanization, the return of large towns and cities and the movement of people to those cities. Urbanization was rapid; it is estimated that 11th century London had a population of only 10-15,000 and by 1300 around 80,0000 lived there. There are a few interrelated reasons for the growth of cities in Europe at this time. Advances in agriculture made it possible for farmers to produce excess food which provided incentive for the development of urban centers as locales of trade and commerce. Furthermore, feudal rulers and the leaders of religious houses (for example, abbeys) found it advantageous to promote and support the growth of markets. In fact, scholar Marc Boone notes that there was often “an ecclesiastical element […] present, since many cities or boroughs developed in the proximity of a monastery or other ecclesiastical community which needed to market surplus goods…” (Clark 225). Additionally, the popularity of cults related to saints and the practice of pilgrimage to religious sites led to “the establishment of urban settlements in order to facilitate the transit of great numbers of pilgrims” (Clark 228). Finally, the growth of universities also spurred urbanization.

Urban areas provided residents with a plethora of opportunities for business and pleasure. One could visit taverns and alehouses, shop for any number of crafted goods, offer prayers at a holy site and much more. Unfortunately, European city dwellers also faced a number of difficulties due to the urban environment and poor living conditions, of Medieval towns and cities. In particular, rapid urbanization led to distinct challenges related to sanitation. Scholars have found evidence of these problems in a wide variety of primary sources including personal accounts and official government ordinances. N.J. Ciecieznski found that a number of issues including the dumping of human and animal waste and refuse from various trades contributed to air pollution, specifically, the spread of foul odors throughout Medieval English cities. They recount a recorded complaint stating “the jurors presented that the common lande leading to le pettes was obstructed because John ate Watre and others and their servants cast dung there, and the carters of London daily brought dung from divers places in the City and unloaded it in the Ward, against ancient custom and to the oppression of the whole” (Ciecieznki 97). This improper disposal of dung not only contributed to foul smells in the area, but also obstructed walkways.

Noxious fumes in London were caused not only by improper waste disposal, but also by the common practice of burning sea coal (coal that washed up on seashores) which contributed to air pollution in London. In addition, lead pollution was prevalent throughout the Medieval Period. Recent ice core analysis reveals “dramatic lead spikes between 1170 and 1219 CE. – “the highest levels of lead pollution before modernity’” with England indicated as the primary contributor of pollutants. (Gibbons 2020). By analyzing the ice cores alongside English tax rolls and historical events scholars found that “lead spiked when kings took power, minted silver coins, and built cathedrals and castles. Levels plunged when plagues, wars, or other crises slowed mining and the air cleared” (Gibbons 2020). As laborers mined and smelted metals the dust was blown to the Swiss Alps on wind currents and then preserved in glaciers.

In addition to air pollution, another common environmental concern in English cities was water pollution. Centuries before the luxuries of flush toilets and underground sewer systems were available in England, city dwellers often relied on streams and rivers to carry away trash and waste. The practice was so common that in 14th century that London authorities “officially permitted citizens to build latrines over the Walbrook stream, which ran through the center of the city” (Ciecieznki 98). A mere century later officials reversed course and abolished latrine building over the waterway and had the stream paved to prevent further dumping.  Another notoriously polluted waterway was the Thames River which was commonly used as a disposal area, in particular, by butchers. The historical record reveals a number of complaints about water pollution which reflects the concerns Londoners had about the health of their urban environments.

English concerns about air and water pollution were linked to Medieval understanding about disease spread. Miasma Theory, a leading belief at the time, linked breathing bad air with sickness. Miasma theory remained prominent for centuries and shaped public health initiatives in England through the 19th century. Therefore, the stink arising from polluted water and piles of refuse in the streets was believed to contribute to disease spread. Individuals with wealth often left the city during the summer, when foul odors intensified. Those who couldnʻt flee the smells carried scented posies and burned herbs in the hopes of “cleansing” the air. Over the years London officials passed ordinances in an effort to clean up the streets and waterways. Unfortunately, sewage and refuse continued to reach waterways. To make matters worse, polluted water was often pumped back into the homes of city dwellers who drank it down and were then susceptible to dysentery, typhoid, and cholera. Cholera outbreaks in London between the 1830s and 1850s caused an estimated 20,000 deaths. Unfortunately, the emphasis on miasma meant that one solution, advanced by 19th century reformer Edwin Chadwick, was to “hasten the abandonment of stinking cesspools in favour of flushing the sewers into the Thames” (Mann 2016).

The increased pollution of the Thames resulted in the infamous “Great Stink” of 1858 when the incredible stench of the Thames, worsened by the summer heat, drove London politicians to support a massive public works project to clean up the river and end the stench. Chief engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, developed an ambitious plan to create a network of new sewers and pumps that would “[divert] rainwater and effluent downstream, well beyond the built-up city to the east, from where it would flow more easily out to sea” (Mann 2016). Balgazetteʻs sewers were engineered to accommodate population growth and “with improvements and additions, the 19th century system remains the backbone of Londonʻs sewers in the 21st century” (Mann 2016).

 

CONCLUSION

In many ways, the period between 500 and 1000 CE was as transitional for Western Europe and Byzantium as it was for East Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Just as the Han State had fragmented politically in the 3rd century and given rise to smaller states ruled by warrior aristocracies, so too had Rome fragmented into its eastern half and a series of Germanic kingdoms, themselves ruled by warrior aristocracies. Just as Mahayana Buddhism had arrived in post-Han China, so too had Christianity become the dominant faith of the Roman Empire and its successors.

And yet, these similarities in the end are superficial. All of China’s successor states maintained a continuity of bureaucracy and literacy to an extent that Western Europe did not. Moreover, although Mahayana Buddhism would become a key element of East Asian culture, it would never come to enjoy a monopoly of power that Christianity enjoyed in Western Europe and Byzantium, and that Islam enjoyed in Spain, the Middle East, and North Africa. The less exclusive nature of Mahayana Buddhism would mean that it would always be one set of practices among many. And the greatest difference is that China eventually saw a return to a unified empire under the Sui and then Tang Dynasties. In spite of Charlemagne’s efforts to create a new empire in the west, the story of Western Europe would be one of competing states rather than an empire claiming universal authority.

Over the 11th and 12th centuries, a rise in agricultural production led to an increase in Western Europe’s wealth and population. The chaos of the 10th and 11th centuries resulted in the development of a feudal system dominated by knights. Feudal Europe was thus able to respond to the Byzantine Empire’s requests for help when its field army was annihilated by Saljuq Turks, resulting in the First Crusade and establishment of a set of Crusader States in the Eastern Mediterranean, but these Crusader states were gradually conquered by Muslim powers over the next two centuries.

As Western Europe grew in population and urbanized, the urban cathedral schools became the center of an increase in intellectual activity over the 12th century known as the 12th Century Renaissance. Scholars used the philosophy of the Ancient Greeks and Arabs to understand the world, and in the 13th century the intellectual movement known as scholasticism would seek to reconcile Christianity with Arabic and Ancient Greek Philosophy. By the end of the Medieval Period, Europe’s intellectuals would seek to study the writings of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and not the commentators of the previous thousand years. This movement marked the origin of  Renaissance humanism.

Europe’s states — with the notable exception of the Holy Roman Empire — gradually consolidated, and the 14th and 15th centuries saw increasing interstate warfare. The states that emerged out of this endemic war, however, were more militarily powerful and more centralized. At the same time, sailors in the service of Spain and Portugal explored the Atlantic and West Africa until the close of the 15th century, when Western Europeans discovered the existence of the continents of the Western Hemisphere. We return in the final chapter to discuss the transformative experiences in Medieval Europe that led to Early Modern European societies.

 
WORKS CITED AND FURTHER READING