HIST&126 week 8

14 -1Forming Christian Societies in Western Europe

People today thinking of Medieval Europe may picture in their minds spectacular but drafty castles, gallant knights clad in steel suits, jousts, elaborately dressed aristocratic women in tall, conical headwear, magnifi-cent cathedrals, and perhaps fire-breathing dragons. Although the dragons only existed in myths and today in fantasy books and films, the others were part of medieval life but only in some places and for a few centuries. The reality was less romantic but nonetheless interesting. The western Roman Empire’s disintegration in the fifth century led to political and social instability, clear-ing the ground for the rise of new societies between 500 and 1000 CE. The mixing of Roman and Germanic traditions as well as relations with non-European peoples spurred creativity. Diverse western European societies developed many common features, including a dominant Christian church and similar social, political, and economic systems. Economic change and technological development also fostered a new Europe.

14 -1aEnvironment and Expanding ChristianityClimate change and disease shaped post-Roman Europe. Between 500 and 900 a cooling climate brought shorter growing seasons before warmer trends returned, while the terrible plague that devastated Europe during sixth-century Byzantine emperor Justinian’s time occasionally reappeared. Given these challenges, not surprisingly people turned to religion for support. Between 200 and 800 western Europe also suffered repeated incursions by migrating peoples. Various Germanic groups destroyed forever the western Roman Empire and culture, preventing any impe-rial restoration like China’s, where Classical society reemerged during the Tang dynasty. Today few people study Latin, once the Mediterranean world’s dominant language.Yet, Europe’s favorable geography enabled similar reli-gious, social, economic, and political patterns to spread. Much of western and central Europe benefited from fertile, well-watered plains rich in minerals and a long coastline offering many fine harbors along the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas and the Atlantic Ocean. Long navigable rivers such as the Danube (DAN-yoob) and Rhine, as well as accessible moun-tain passes through the Alps, the main mountain chain in the middle of Europe, made communication much easier than in Asia, Africa, and South America. Hence, land and sea networks linked diverse societies, fostering the movement of ideas, prod-ucts, peoples, technologies, and diseases.As Roman power melted away, the church became the major authority, with local bishops and monasteries often the only government in rural areas. Over time the Roman bishops gained authority, eventually claiming the title of pope (Holy Father) and heading the vast church apparatus. Increasingly the papacy symbolized an independent church not controlled by any one government and asserting influence over kings. Popes continued efforts to spread the faith to those Germanic peoples still following their ancient gods. Around 600 Pope Gregory I sanctioned turning pagan worship sites into churches rather than destroying them. The Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent in England converted and dispatched missionaries to German lands, most famously Boniface (BON-uh-face) (ca. 675–754), a member of the Benedictine order, who won many converts.Christians blended German values and practices into their faith. Hence, they changed the pagan use of special amulets or charms to ward off evil to wearing Christian medals around the neck honoring Jesus or his mother. After acquiring key govern-mental positions, Christians often persecuted non-Christians, destroying their houses of worship or denying them government appointments. Since many church bishops came from upper-class German families, Christian leaders began valuing warriors and fighting, never a prominent feature of early Christianity. Even local church leaders often seemed more concerned with protect-ing their territory and family than promoting Christian values.The church also sponsored religious orders. From Christianity’s earliest centuries, some men and women tried to escape the corrup-tions and temptations of cities by moving to isolated places to pray and prepare for Heaven. Many monks joined monasteries, commu-nities for men who had taken holy orders. Monasteries grew their own food, with monks clearing forests for crops, and some larger monasteries provided social services such as shelter for travelers, emergency food, and clothing for the poor. At the same time, some women joined convents for lives of service or prayer.While monks and nuns tried to escape society, they helped create a new culture. With the slogan “to work is to pray,” monks filled their lives with activity to avoid idleness, and one form of work, copying manuscripts, eventually created the bound book. The monks’ willingness to serve God and their neighbors with their hands and their hearts gave manual labor a respect it never enjoyed in the Classical Mediterranean world.

14 -1bThe Frankish and Holy Roman EmpiresBetween 500 and 1000 Europe’s political map changed. Muslim armies conquered North Africa, the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and most of Spain during the seventh and eighth centuries (see Chapter 10), and Muslim bands raided Italy and France. Frankish ruler Charles Martel’s victory at the Battle of Tours in France in 732 finally stopped these raids. Following this victory, the Franks created a large state in western Europe. In 753 Pope Stephen sought their aid against the Germanic Lombard kingdom in northern Italy, which threatened papal control of central Italy. He then anointed the Frankish king Pepin (PEP-in) the Short as Italy’s special protector, indicat-ing the sacred nature of kingship in Christian thought and the pope’s belief in his right to designate political rulers. In return, Pepin defeated the Lombards and donated land in central Italy to the pope, the foundation for small Papal States surround-ing Rome that would remain under papal control for over one thousand years. Western Europe’s chief religious leaders became divided between their spiritual and earthly concerns.The papal–Frankish relationship grew during a new dynasty known as the Carolingians (kah-roe-LIN-gee-uhnz) after their greatest ruler, Charlemagne (r. 768–814), was crowned by the pope in Rome. Charlemagne spread Frankish power from France and northern Italy deep into the lands of another Germanic people, the Saxons, in north and central Germany, temporarily uniting the heart of western Europe (see Map 14.1). Taking great interest in his peoples’ religious lives, Charlemagne promoted both education and Christianity, using the church to strengthen his empire by appointing bishops and priests, influ-encing ceremonies and doctrines, ordering executions for violat-ing religious obligations, and controlling monasteries. To enhance his power, he sent diplomatic missions to Byzantium and various Islamic states. Charlemagne told Pope Leo III he would defend the church from its enemies, and the pope’s only job was “to assist the success of our arms with your hands raised in prayer to God.”3 In return for protecting and promoting Christianity, Carolingians expected church leaders, from priests and bishops to monastery abbots, to be loyal to the king.Although crowning Charlemagne “Emperor of the Romans” revived the Roman Empire symbolically, papal relations with Carolingian rulers also ensured later church–state conflict. Popes argued that lay control over church matters needed papal approval, while later German rulers wanted some political control in Italy.Charlemagne’s empire was divided among his three grandsons in the Treaty of Verdun (vuhr-DUN) in 843, and eventually other Germanic peoples challenged the Franks for influence. The Saxon ruler Otto I, known as Otto the Great (r. 936–973), built a new empire, establishing control over rebellious princes in Germany and leading an army into northern Italy; in 962 the pope declared Otto “Roman Emperor.” From this point until 1806, rulers in Germany retained this title, eventually proclaiming their lands as the “Holy Roman Empire.” But this empire had little in common with the Classical Roman Empire. Much of its territory was never under Roman control, and most Germans, Italians, Slavs, Czechs, and Hungarians within its domains had little sense of common citizenship or much awareness of politics beyond the local level. Like the Carolingians, Otto and his successors both defended and dominated the church, even appointing bishops in their lands.14 -1cVikings and Other InvadersEurope’s heartland continued to attract other peoples seeking wealth. Norse, Danish, and Swedish Vikings—or, as many called them, Northmen—facing population pressures that led them to launch raids out of Scandinavia, a region with limited productive In 753 Pope Stephen sought their aid against the Germanic Lombard kingdom in northern Italy, which threatened papal control of central Italy. He then anointed the Frankish king Pepin (PEP-in) the Short as Italy’s special protector, indicat-ing the sacred nature of kingship in Christian thought and the pope’s belief in his right to designate political rulers. In return, Pepin defeated the Lombards and donated land in central Italy to the pope, the foundation for small Papal States surround-ing Rome that would remain under papal control for over one thousand years. Western Europe’s chief religious leaders became divided between their spiritual and earthly concerns.The papal–Frankish relationship grew during a new dynasty known as the Carolingians (kah-roe-LIN-gee-uhnz) after their greatest ruler, Charlemagne (r. 768–814), was crowned by the pope in Rome. Charlemagne spread Frankish power from France and northern Italy deep into the lands of another Germanic people, the Saxons, in north and central Germany, temporarily uniting the heart of western Europe (see Map 14.1). Taking great interest in his peoples’ religious lives, Charlemagne promoted both education and Christianity, using the church to strengthen his empire by appointing bishops and priests, influ-encing ceremonies and doctrines, ordering executions for violat-ing religious obligations, and controlling monasteries. To enhance his power, he sent diplomatic missions to Byzantium and various Islamic states. Charlemagne told Pope Leo III he would defend the church from its enemies, and the pope’s only job was “to assist the success of our arms with your hands raised in prayer to God.”3 In return for protecting and promoting Christianity, Carolingians expected church leaders, from priests and bishops to monastery abbots, to be loyal to the king.Although crowning Charlemagne “Emperor of the Romans” revived the Roman Empire symbolically, papal relations with Carolingian rulers also ensured later church–state conflict. Popes argued that lay control over church matters needed papal approval, while later German rulers wanted some political control in Italy.Charlemagne’s empire was divided among his three grandsons in the Treaty of Verdun (vuhr-DUN) in 843, and eventually other Germanic peoples challenged the Franks for influence. The Saxon ruler Otto I, known as Otto the Great (r. 936–973), built a new empire, establishing control over rebellious princes in Germany and leading an army into northern Italy; in 962 the pope declared Otto “Roman Emperor.” From this point until 1806, rulers in Germany retained this title, eventually proclaiming their lands as the “Holy Roman Empire.” But this empire had little in common with the Classical Roman Empire. Much of its territory was never under Roman control, and most Germans, Italians, Slavs, Czechs, and Hungarians within its domains had little sense of common citizenship or much awareness of politics beyond the local level. Like the Carolingians, Otto and his successors both defended and dominated the church, even appointing bishops in their lands.14 -1cVikings and Other InvadersEurope’s heartland continued to attract other peoples seeking wealth. Norse, Danish, and Swedish Vikings—or, as many called them, Northmen—facing population pressures that led them to launch raids out of Scandinavia, a region with limited productive Vikings also established permanent settlements in coastal England, Ireland, and the islands north of Scotland, founding towns that later became cities like Dublin and York; recent DNA studies show widespread Viking ancestry in the British Isles. Other Vikings settled down in western France, in Normandy (named after Normans or Northmen). Normans descended from these Vikings conquered England in 1066.Eventually Vikings gave up raiding for trade and farming. Those settling outside Scandinavia built towns, intermarried with local people, and adopted the local Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Germanic, or Slavic cultures. But their heritage remains in many place names and words in local languages such as English. Vikings left other legacies as well. Among the world’s greatest maritime explorers, Norse Vikings began settling Iceland in 874 and founded several settlements on Greenland in 986. Around 1000 a few Greenland Vikings established an outpost on Newfoundland, a large island off the coast of eastern Canada, staying for a few years and perhaps hoping to establish a permanent settlement. But whether because they felt threat-ened and outnumbered by the hostile local Native Americans or because of bitter divisions within the community, they returned to Greenland. Nonetheless, some evidence suggests that Greenlanders apparently made occasional trading visits to eastern Canada for the next several centuries. These Viking explorers also fostered a democratic ideal, as shown by the Icelanders’ elected assembly, the Althing (“general assembly”) that was created in 930 to make and administer laws. Icelanders adopted Christianity by the votes of local communities in 1000.Two other warlike peoples, Bulgars (BUL-gahrz) and Magyars (MAG-yahrz), migrated from Russia into central Europe. The Slavic Bulgars, contained by Byzantine armies, eventually converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and settled in the eastern Balkan region known as Bulgaria. Magyars, excellent horsemen speaking a Ural-Altaic language related to Turkish, moved into the Hungarian plain, threaten-ing Germany and Italy. However, German forces under Otto the Great crushed a large Magyar army in 955; Magyars then settled permanently in Hungary, adopting Roman Christianity.14 -1dEarly Medieval Trade, Moorish Spain, and TechnologyWhile most Europeans were peasants, growing food or rais-ing livestock, merchants traded wool hides, salt, fish, wine, and grain over long distances, often by sea or riverboat. Eastern Mediterranean trade continued briskly, tightly controlled by Byzantine rulers, and east–west trade grew dynamic. Venice, a northeast Italian port city, was an active trading center through-out the Middle Ages, competing with a northwest Italian city, Genoa, to dominate trade with the Middle East and Byzantium. Other Italian cities remained connected to the Byzantine econ-omy. Merchants occasionally visited even remote towns, and aristocrats purchased luxury goods such as silk produced in the East. By 800, multiple networks of exchange reconnected west-ern Europeans to each other and to eastern Europe and the increasingly Islamic western Asia and North Africa.Europeans benefited from growing connections with the Muslim world, as Islamic expansion stimulated a movement of people, goods, and information, such as Asian science and Classical Greek thought, that influenced many Afro-Eurasian societies. Muslim armies had conquered much of Spain in the early eighth century and Sicily in the ninth century, which affected Europe in various ways (see Chapter 10). For example, intellectual life was enriched by the exchange of products, books, and ideas between Christian Europe and cosmopolitan Islamic (often termed Moorish) Spain and Sicily. Scholars, students, and merchants from all over the Mediterranean and the Frankish kingdom gravitated to Spanish cities such as Cordoba and Toledo, where Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions interacted. Hence, from these centers of learning, the philosophical, scientific, mathematical, and tech-nological writings of many Classical Greek and South Asian as well as Persian and Arab thinkers were translated into Latin and various vernacular languages and spread among educated Europeans.It was in twelfth-century Sicily, by then ruled by Normans from France, that the brilliant Arab cartographer, geographer, and mathematician al-Idrisi, born in North Africa, educated in Cordoba, and now an adviser to the Sicilian king Roger II, com-piled an extraordinary map that depicts the world from Iceland and West Africa to China and Southeast Asia. The map resulted from a collaboration between peoples of different faiths and cultures—Arabs, Persians, Europeans, and Africans—and relied on information from many sources and countries. The map was flat but al-Idrisi was well aware that the globe was round and he calculated the circumference of Earth to within 10 percent of its real size. In the 1140s, an Italian translator of Arabic texts wrote that “it befits us to imitate the Arabs especially, for they are our teachers and the pioneers.”6 Hence, Irish physicians could read the pathbreaking medical books by the eleventh-century poly-math and physician Ibn Sina in a Gaelic translation.Various technological improvements, some originating in Asia, now came into common use in western Europe, laying the basis for European expansion after 1000. Some major techno-logical innovations improved agriculture, spurring higher grain yields that fostered European population growth. The rugged moldboard plow, with a blade that dug the earth and an attached moldboard that turned over the furrow, enabled farmers to turn and drain the heavy, wet soil of northern Europe, where dif-ficult farming conditions kept populations sparse. Horseshoes, adopted from Central Asians in the ninth century, allowed farmers to expand their use of horses to plow fields, especially when combined with horse collars. Invented in China, horse collars distributed the weight across the animal’s shoulders so the horse could pull more weight and work longer hours. The most crucial improvement, the three-field system, replaced the Roman two-field system. Europeans divided their fields into three parts and let only one-third lie fallow each year, increasing their yield by planting winter and summer wheat in the other two fields. Increased grain consumption produced a better-balanced diet.Other innovations fostered industry. First invented in Roman times, watermills built along rivers and streams generated power, freeing up human and animal labor for other tasks. By 1056 over 5,600 watermills in England provided power for such activities as sawing logs and grinding wheat into flour, allowing mechanization of some industries, and by the 1100s Europeans used windmills, invented in Persia, to generate power for such industries as grind-ing grain. The wheelbarrow also reached Europe from China.

With the Roman Empire’s decline, the Christian church became a power in its own right with influence over kings; monasteries created a new culture that respected manual labor.Under Germanic influence, Christians more aggressively spread their faith, assimilating “pagan” practices and transforming them into Christian ones.During this time the Papal States were created, Charlemagne’s Carolingian empire temporarily united much of Europe, and Otto the Great began the tradition of calling Germany the “Holy Roman Empire.”The Vikings of Scandinavia, who raided European lands for over four centuries, were also good traders and eventually settled in Iceland, Greenland, and various European territories.As merchants engaged in growing networks of exchange, trade with the expanding Muslim world and contact with Muslim Spain introduced Europeans to Classical Greek, Indian, Arab, and Persian ideas and technologies.

Three institutions dominated medieval Europe between 800 and 1300: the papacy in religion and church–state relations, feudalism in politics and social structure, and manorialism in the economic realm. Both feudalism and manorialism developed from late Roman Empire roots, varying greatly across western Europe. The pluralism of religious, social, political, and economic institutions forged in early medieval Europe, combined with an unusually warm climate, spurred many changes between 1000 and 1300. In this period, called the “High Middle Ages,” growing church and papal power fostered conflict with rulers and intellectuals. Tensions between religious and lay rulers, between Roman and Byzantine Christian leaders, and between Christians and Muslims, along with growing divergence between cities, with their merchant classes, and traditional feudal aristocrats ruling in the countryside, helped reshape European society.14 -2aThe Emergence of FeudalismAlthough some historians consider the concept misleading and overgeneralized, most characterize the complex and decentralized social, political, and economic system in these centuries as feudalism, a political arrangement in which a weak central monarchy ruled over smaller, largely autonomous states and aristocratic families that owed military and labor service obligations as vassals to the monarch. In turn, these nobles ruled as lords over their own vassals, the warriors and farmers on their estates. Church leaders supported this arrangement, arguing that “it is the will of the Creator that the higher shall always rule over the lower. Each individual and each class should stay in its place [and] perform its tasks.”7 This feudalistic political and social formation was strongest in France, England, and parts of Italy. Although many monarchs had little power beyond their capital and hinterland, some small states were part of a larger unit, such as the Holy Roman Empire, with their princes owing allegiance to the king but exercising power in their domains.Despite the Christian church’s role in creating a common culture and strong rulers such as Charlemagne and Otto the Great, certain forces fostered the decentralization that characterized feudalism. The old Roman roads fell into disrepair, disrupting transportation and trade, and Europe remained sparsely populated with few cities. By 1000 France, the most densely populated region, had only eight or nine million people, England a million and a half, and Europe as a whole around forty million, less than half of Song China’s 100 million. With both money and talent scarce and land the source of wealth, Charlemagne rewarded his best soldiers and officials by giving them control over land. Vassals who held such land grants, called benefices, took an oath of personal loyalty to the king, promising him military service in exchange for a free hand governing their territory, collecting taxes from the inhabitants, and administering justice.Feudalism also refers to legal relations between lords and vas-sals, including the fief, the thing granted in a feudal contract, usually land but occasionally something such as the right to collect tolls on a bridge. With a large enough fief of land, the vassal could subdivide it and have his own vassals. Feudalism allowed a king to rule a large country without personally administering it. Ruling through sub-ordinates was most common in England, especially after William, Duke of Normandy, invaded in 1066, forming a feudal monarchy.Feudal society included knights, armored military retainers swearing allegiance to their lord. They fought mostly on horseback while bearing the heavy expense of warhorses and elaborate armor. Knights had a rigid code of behavior, including a sense of duty and honor known as chivalry. A thirteenth-century French writer explained the chivalric ideal: “A knight must be hardy, courteous, generous, loyal and of fair speech; ferocious to his foe, frank and debonair to his friend. [He] has proved himself in arms and thereby won the praise of men.”8 Despite romantic images of knights wielding lances in jousts or defending maidens from fire-breathing dragons, the reality was usually more mundane. Knights wore 60 pounds of chain-mail armor and often collapsed from heat exhaustion. The formidable steel suits of armor seen in museums today were not generally used until the 1400s. Regular fights between rival states and lords kept knights busy, and successful knights might acquire wealth and marry into an aristocratic family. The stirrup, brought by Central Asians, enabled knights to stand when delivering blows, making the blows more powerful than if delivered while seated.14 -2bManors, Cities, and TradeThe rural economy was based on manorialism, a system of autonomous, nearly self-sufficient agricultural estates. As Roman cities had become expensive, wealthy Romans had retreated to their large country estates and hired low-wage agricultural workers. Eventually these Roman estates and villages became manors, each supplying its own needs, from mills for grinding grain to blacksmiths for shoeing horses. Often organized around a castle, manors were owned by nobles with rights to the produce grown by hereditary serfs, peasants legally bound to their lord and tied to the land through the generations. Tilling the lord’s fields as well as their own, serfs had use of the manor’s resources, such as farming tools or crafts, and protection in the manor house or castle if the settlement was attacked. Although they could not change their status or leave without permission, they could not be dispossessed unless they failed to satisfy their obligations. Warned to work hard to receive their eventual reward in Heaven, they paid for security with a lifetime of drudgery, alleviated for many by diversions like dice games, wrestling, and bawdy jokes and stories. Occasional peasant revolts indicated some dissatisfaction.Although serfdom became far more pervasive, slavery did not disappear altogether in Europe. Mostly farmers or domestic servants, slaves constituted perhaps 10 percent of the English population until the eleventh century, were common in Italy and Spain, and also worked papal estates and the farms of French monasteries. Leading Christian thinkers like Saint Thomas Aquinas argued that slavery was morally justified and an eco-nomic necessity. An active Byzantium-based Mediterranean slave trade acquired slaves, mostly Slavs, Greeks, and Turks, from the Black Sea region, shipping them to southern Europe and North Africa. Carolingians and Venetians also sold European slaves to Arabs, while Vikings sold English and French slaves they had seized to Byzantium and Moorish Spain. By the 1400s Arabs and Portuguese were selling enslaved West Africans in southern Europe, and by the end of the fifteenth century black Africans constituted some 40 percent of the slaves in the Spanish city of Valencia; the remainder were mostly Muslims, Russians, Greek Orthodox Christians, Canary Islanders, and Jews.Populations, towns, and cities grew. Compared to Byzantium, China, and the Islamic world, early medieval west-ern Europe was economically underdeveloped and had small cities: by 1000 Rome had only thirty-five thousand people; Paris, twenty thousand; and London, ten thousand. By contrast, Constantinople had three hundred thousand, Kaifeng in China had four hundred thousand, Cordoba in Moorish Spain nearly five hundred thousand, and the world’s largest city, Baghdad, a million people. However, between 1000 and 1300 new methods of growing crops spurred a doubling of Europe’s population to about seventy-five million, and western European cities became centers of trade and industry. Milan and Paris grew to almost one hundred thousand, and London had thirty thousand people and a problem with air pollution due to coal burning.Some people considered cities degenerate places. An eleventh-century English monk detested London:I do not like that city. All sorts of men crowd together there from every country. Each race brings its own vices. No one lives in it without falling into some sort of crime. Actors, jesters, smooth-skinned lads, flatterers, effeminates, pederasts, singing and dancing girls, quacks, belly-dancers, sorceresses, extortioners, magicians, mimes, beggars, buffoons: all this tribe f ill all the houses. Therefore, if you do not want to dwell with evildoers, do not live in London.9Although transportation was largely limited to horses, carts, boats, and human feet, people did move around, albeit slowly.Hence, in 1297 when the Duchess of Brabant moved with her large clothing collection from London to her new husband’s home 85 miles away, it took the cart, pulled by five horses, eighteen days to complete the trip. Nevertheless, urban life and its economic opportunities attracted people. A German expression, “city air makes one free,” confirmed that a serf who left the manor and spent “a year and a day” in a city without being caught was considered legally free. Thus cities increasingly operated outside the feudal social and political structure. City craftsmen and merchants organized themselves into fraternal organizations called guilds to protect members’ economic interests and to win exemptions from feudal obligations. Eventually city charters, secured from the local lord or king who needed the wealth that city commerce and payments brought, allowed cities to have their own courts and other self-government privileges.Although merchants benefited from cities and commer-cial expansion, they had to overcome social prejudices. In feu-dal society, people belonged to one of three categories, in order of importance: “those who prayed” (churchmen, priests, and monks), “those who fought” (aristocratic warriors, knights), and “those who worked” (peasants). Merchants and bankers had no place in this hierarchy unless they married an impoverished aristocrat’s daughter and hence acquired land. But most mer-chants also shared society’s values and Christian faith. Hence, the English merchant Godric of Pinchale (ca. 1069–1170) left home as a teenager to peddle goods in nearby villages and then traded goods by sea between England, Scotland, Denmark, and Holland. Eventually he owned a small fleet of vessels, becoming quite wealthy and making pilgrimages to Jerusalem. He never married and later in life gave away all his wealth to the poor, became a hermit, wrote religious poetry, and gained fame for his piety.People resented merchants for selling goods for more than they paid for them and consorting with foreigners. With greed considered a serious sin, loaning money at interest was regarded as usury, a sin because the lender made a profit without doing any labor. But moneylending was necessary to commerce, and even popes borrowed money at interest. While Italians became renowned bankers, moneylending was often left to Jews, allowing Christians to benefit from borrowing money without committing usury. Gradually using and lending money became more acceptable.Long-distance trade reached its peak between 1100 and 1350 as western Europeans shipped woolen textiles, flax, hemp, wines, olive oil, fruit, and timber to the East in return for luxury goods from Byzantium and Asia such as spices, silk, perfumes, and precious gems. As trade and commerce around Europe grew, prejudice against mer-chants declined. Cities such as Constantinople, Venice, Genoa, Bruges (broozh) and Amsterdam in the Low Countries, and Strassburg in the Rhineland became major commercial hubs. Italian merchants acquired goods from the Middle East and Byzantium, shipping them to Belgium and Holland for woolen textiles. One French ruler, the Count of Champagne (shahm-PAHN-yuh), established the “Champagne fairs”, when goods were displayed at town fairs last-ing seven weeks. The wealth created fostered a commercial revolu-tion, making merchants and bankers more influential.Eventually commerce became more central to Europe’s economy than agriculture, although the broad repercussions—the rise of capitalism; incorporation of merchants as a vital social class; stronger monarchies; and weakening of both feudalism and the Christian church—became clear only centuries later. While both popes and political leaders in Europe remained power-ful, the merchant class gradually gained political and economic influence to challenge feudal nobles and eventually monarchies.14 -2cSocial Life and GroupsUntil the past several decades we knew more about queens and female saints than average women in medieval Europe. Now we are get-ting a more balanced view of men and women. Medieval society was patriarchal with double standards that favored men, though family life and gender relations varied with social status and local customs. Generally, men supported their families while women ran households and raised chil-dren. Parents preferred sons, who passed on the family line, property, and name, and arranged most marriages. Society allowed men to have sex outside marriage but valued women for their virginity and faithfulness. The church considered marriage a necessary evil, with sex only for procreation, not plea-sure. A leading theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas, contended that “woman was created to help man, but only in the act of procre-ation, because in all other tasks he can find far better support elsewhere.” One priest even warned married people to avoid sex on the Sabbath because “monsters, cripples, and all sickly children [are] conceived on Saturday nights.”10 However, rulers often flouted cus-tom. Charlemagne enforced rigid Christian morality on his people while also marrying four times, having five mistresses, and siring eighteen children.Today’s Western middle-class model of a husband, wife, and their unmarried children living in one independent household, sepa-rate from the larger family, was the exception. Many women married late, and many men and women remained unmarried. Children often left their birth families at an early age to become apprentices in a trade, servants, or novices in religious orders. Laws favoring men spurred many women to join convents, all-female Christian communities that offered physical and social protection and leadership possibilities. A fourteenth-century treatise from an unknown man, named by historians “the Good Man of Paris,” tells us something of mar-ried life. In his account we see a much younger and somewhat nervous and awkward fifteen-year-old girl married off to a man she may have scarcely known. She asked him to not speak harshly to her in front of strangers but also to help her become a good wife. He advised her to love him more than her family, be distant with other men, not be arrogant and disobedient to him, and then argued that in nature and in Christian teachings females must defer to males. However, he seems to have been a thoughtful man in the context of his time. We will never know if they had a happy marriage, but they both seemed to want to make it work.

Medieval society had contradictory views of women. Biblical gender stereotypes fostered the belief that women had to be subordinate to men, were depraved, led men into sin, and were intellectually inferior. Yet, Mary, the Virgin Mother of Jesus, became one of the most popular objects of devotion, with many cathedrals named after Notre Dame (NO-truh DAHM)(“Our Lady”). Furthermore, women could inherit property and were involved in the larger economy, working in many occupa-tions, including farming, ale making, baking, small-scale trade, glassmaking, workshop management, and the textile industry. Some were seamstresses or weavers who embroidered a range of fabrics, sometimes in workshops, for family and friends but also to sell, even advertising their skills and wares. A 2018 study concluded that a few even produced medieval manuscripts, once thought to be done exclusively by monks. Some became scholars, like the tenth-century writer Lubna of Cordoba, who managed the royal library there, or accomplished in fields like medicine, such as the fourteenth-century Italian Alessandra Giliani, a respected expert in anatomy.Probably originating in Moorish Spain, where women poets flourished, by the 1100s courtly love developed, a new concept of passionate but pure relationships between knights and ladies. Celebrated in song by wandering troubadours, it brought romance to male–female relations and, combined with the Virgin Mary cult, elevated aristocratic women’s status. But whether courtly or not, romantic love existed mostly outside of marriage. In medieval tales, knights often sought the favors of fair maidens (usually the wife of another, perhaps their lord) who were unattainable. With adultery considered a high crime, the knight’s love was usually unrequited.Early Christian tolerance of homosexuality survived through the Early Middle Ages. Although various church lead-ers and rulers condemned those whom they called “sodomites,” after the immoral biblical city of Sodom, public attitudes were often more accepting, with considerable homosexual fiction and poetry published in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Several prominent bishops and English kings were thought to be homosexuals. By the thirteenth century, public attitudes shifted. Growing states promoted uniformity in social relations and religious views, fostering suspicion of those outside the mainstream. The church launched a violent campaign against heresy and unconventional behavior, often targeting suspected homosexuals. Whereas in 1250 homosexual behavior was legal and accepted in most of Europe, by 1300 it was a capital offense in many societies.Tightly ordered medieval society was rife with tensions, with violent crime common and daily life precarious for rich and poor alike. Most Europeans disliked the Romany (or Gypsies), a wandering group originally from north India who arrived in Europe from the Middle East between 1,000 and 1,500 years ago. This prejudice still exists in many European countries. Historians debate whether skin color was important in differentiating people in this era. Prejudice and hatred cer-tainly existed against groups seen as culturally and religiously different and therefore viewed as inferior, evil, and danger-ous, such as Romany, Jews, and Muslims. This sometimes led to expulsion or sporadic violence against minorities as well as “badge of shame” laws requiring Jews to wear different clothes and live in different neighborhoods than Christians, as happened in England in 1275. Racism and racial preju-dice in the West based on skin color became a bigger issue after 1500. Many tensions arose from major distinctions between Christians and “outsiders”—nonbelievers, Muslims, Jews, heretics. Christians described Muslims as “pagans,” who reciprocated by calling Christians “infidels” (unbelievers). The drive to destroy all beliefs outside of the Christian mainstream eventually led to a long series of Crusades against Islam and persecution of Jews.Many European towns had Jewish communities. Although Jews worked in many occupations, they were best known as merchants and bankers because Christians were forbidden to loan money at interest. Resentment of Jewish commercial success and moneylending made them scapegoats for hard-to-explain misfortunes, such as epidemics. While Christians mostly tolerated Jews before 1150, anti-Semitism (AN-tee-SEM-uh-tiz-uhm) increased dramatically as more Christians took up banking or more militantly asserted their faith. In 1182 France ordered Jews to leave, an expulsion imitated in other countries during the next three centuries. Governments also restricted Jewish businesses and residences to certain dis-tricts. Our modern term ghetto originally described medieval city neighborhoods where Jews were compelled to live. Many expelled Jews migrated to Poland and Byzantium, which devel-oped large Jewish populations.Struggling to differentiate correct belief from heresy, Christians directed disdain at alleged heretics. While some devout Christians criticized church corruption, ill-educated priests, and arrogant bishops, church leaders viewed reformers as her-etics. Hence, they organized military attacks on the Albigensians (AL-buh-JEN-shunz), a group in southern France who criticized the church’s material wealth, urged clerical poverty, and wanted the Bible translated from Latin into the vernacular languages such as French and German so that ordinary people could read it for themselves. The church destroyed the Albigensians by killing their followers and confiscating their property.14 -2dThe Church as a Social and Political ForceThe church enjoyed social and political power but also experi-enced turmoil during the High Middle Ages. Massive cathe-drals with lofty spires inspired deep emotions and still do. Many Christian leaders and local priests were well respected. Medieval Christians registered births and marriages and paid taxes in the village church, and they measured the stages of their lives by sacraments such as baptism and matrimony, which priests had to administer. Able to deny someone the sacraments, considered necessary for salva-tion, medieval priests had enor-mous power. They could also excommunicate, or expel a person from the church and its sacraments, a psychologically devastating act.Not all priests and bishops lived up to their responsibilities or growing expectations for celibacy. Many priests had little education and could barely recite the Latin liturgy, and some were corrupt and took bribes. Many priests and monks were also married. Reformist church leaders, believing priests should not be distracted by families and not wanting priests to pass on their parishes to their children, attempted to crack down. Nonetheless, even after the final ban on clerical marriage many priests were married, kept mistresses, or were either homosexual or assumed to be so. Many people had ambivalent attitudes toward the clergy, fearing priests because of their power and ridiculing them because of their shortcomings.In the eleventh century, reformers attempted to change the church and end abuses by priests, monks, and high officials. New religious orders tried to restore monastic life to its original purity, insisting that all monks remain celibate. Several German rulers also appointed reform-minded popes who tried to end simony(SIGH-muh-nee), a common practice whereby wealthy families paid to have their sons appointed bishops, who collected signifi-cant revenues in their territories. Attempting to keep European rulers from interfering in papal elections, the church established the College of Cardinals in 1059 to elect the pope. Churchmen made Roman law the basis of church law because it referred all matters to the person at the top, in this case the pope.Growing papal political power became clear when a major church–state conflict erupted over the appointment of bishops. For centuries rulers had appointed leading nobles to key church offices in their states. But in 1075 Pope Gregory VII (ca. 1020–1085) excommunicated the German emperor for appointing the archbishop of Milan (mi-LAHN). Gregory had a low opinion of kings, who “derive their origin from men ignorant of God who raised themselves above their fellows by pride, plunder, treachery, murder, at the instigation of the Devil.”11 In 1122 both men compromised, agreeing that both emperor and pope would invest new bishops. This dispute strengthened papal authority and weakened German emperors. As German rulers intervened in Italian politics to regain control over the church, they lost influence over their own princes at home, leading eventually to decentralized government and political warfare in German-speaking lands. Another pope, Innocent III (r. 1198–1216), dramatically extended papal authority over secular rulers, using his control over the sacra-ments to force King John of England to accept the pope’s candidate for archbishop of Canterbury and requiring the French king to take back a wife he had divorced. He also required Jews to wear distinc-tive clothing and aggressively punished “heretical depravity.”The papal drive to investigate and eliminate heresy led to the Holy Inquisition, a church court created in 1231. Churchmen tried thousands of people with views outside the mainstream, with popes sanctioning torture and starvation to induce confessions. Those found guilty faced punishments, including penances, banishment, prison, mutilation, and death. Over two centuries several thousand people were executed. The most notorious inquisition began, under state rather than church control, in Spain in 1478 and perpetrated brutal persecution of Jews and Muslims, burning at least two thousand people at the stake. The inquisitions continued into the 1600s and included bans on books viewed as dangerous to the faith. The ban continued until the mid-twentieth century.Christians adopted ancient Jewish ideas about nature and history, including the concept of progress. Early Christian thinkers believed that human society improved with time, an idea then foreign to most of the world. Originating with the seven-day creation story in Genesis, this linear rather than cyclical concept viewed history as moving progressively from one point to another. To many Christian thinkers, God planned the world, including the natural environment, for human benefit, an idea that necessitated exploiting nature. With no item having any purpose but to serve humans, God, they argued, wanted people to improve land by clearing forests and wetlands, which some monasteries did with enthusiasm. This attitude toward nature justified the great technological and economic development to later emerge in the West and also caused environmental problems.Some Christian and Jewish thinkers dissented from these views and affirmed nature as God’s creation that required care and stewardship. Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), who renounced wealth to found a new religious order, the Franciscans (fran-SIS-kuhnz), dedicated to lives of poverty, humility, and serving the urban poor, saw all creatures as part of God’s plan. The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides wrote that “it should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the existence of man.”12 Furthermore, kings and lords often protected the forests where they enjoyed hunting.14 -2eNew European StatesThreatened by increasing papal power, and with growing economies reducing the need for feudal vassals, rulers sought more control over their lands (see Map 14.2). English kings were most successful at centralizing power. After conquering England, William of Normandy (1027–1087) divided the land among his chief vassals, but by the 1100s William’s successors had reduced the local nobility’s authority and were appointing justices and tax collectors. King Henry II (r. 1154–1189), who invaded Ireland in 1171 and established control of the island’s eastern region, expanded the royal courts’ power over feudal and church courts.However, some English rulers unintentionally laid the foundations for later representative government. King John (Prince John of the Robin Hood legend), under pressure from leading barons and the Catholic Church that he had angered, weakened royal power in 1215 by signing the Magna Carta (MAG-nuh KAHR-tuh) or “Great Charter,” an agreement that limited the feudal and taxation rights of the king and his officials while protecting the rights of the church, lords, and merchants. The Magna Carta was later used to support the notion that rulers had to have their subjects’ consent, a foundation of modern English constitutional monarchy. Another step toward representation was taken because of Henry III’s (r. 1216–1272) incessant demands for taxes to fight foreign wars. In 1265, rebellious barons called together a parliament (literally, a “speaking place”) including middle-class townspeople and knights to air their grievances and demand that the king consider their views. This parliament became the model for later meetings called by kings to secure approval of their policies.Like the English kings, the Capetians (kuh-PEE-shuhnz), who succeeded the Carolingians as kings in France (987–1328), also tried to increase their power and expand their territory. King Philip II (r. 1180–1223) gained control over Normandy in northwestern France and replaced noblemen with paid officials more loyal to the crown. Louis IX, or Saint Louis (r. 1226–1270), a pious man, curbed the nobility’s power while persecuting heretics and Jews. Philip the Fair (r. 1285–1314) may have had the most impact on France and Europe. To raise money for his wars, he arrested all the Jews, seizing their prop-erty before expelling them in 1306, and had the leaders of a militant religious order, the Knights Templar (TEM-plahr), burned at the stake as heretics so he could default on a loan.

When Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294–1303) challenged Philip’s growing power, Philip accused him of sexual perversion and murder and sent a force to Italy to arrest him. Townspeople rescued the pope by driving French troops away. For the next seventy years (1305–1377), the College of Cardinals, bowing to French pressure, elected popes, mostly French, who chose to live in Avignon (ah-vee-NYON), a papal territory in southern France. Philip’s ruthless action showed that papal control over European rulers was ending. France emerged as the strongest western European kingdom.The German Hohenstaufen (HO-uhn-SHTOU-fuhn)dynasty (1152 and 1254), in trying to control Italy while the feudal German nobility remained powerful, had less success centralizing their lands. Frederick I (r. 1154–1190) reasserted his authority as Holy Roman Emperor over the wealthy north-ern Italy cities, but the pope organized an Italian coalition and defeated Frederick’s forces. Frederick I’s successors gradually lost power to German princes. Italy divided into small papal-ruled and nonpapal states. Only seven hundred years later did Germany finally achieve the territorial unity enjoyed by France and England.14 -2fThe Crusades and Intellectual LifeThe religious and political tensions helped foster the Crusades, a series of military expeditions or holy wars between 1095 and 1272 to reclaim the “Holy Land,” Palestine, from Muslim control (see Chapter 10). Historians—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and secular—fiercely debate the origins, aims, and consequences of the Crusades, making this a very contro-versial subject today that also has religious undertones. But the debate also sometimes transcends religious differences. Some rationalize the crusades as an understandable, often idealistic Christian response to Muslim expansion into Europe, even if they concede that some of the actions were horrifying. Some others deplore the crusades as imperialistic, even racist attacks on non-Christians and non-Europeans by religious fanatics and criminals. European Christians had long made pilgrimages to Jerusalem and considered the city part of their world. Crusading began after the Byzantine emperor sought help to dislodge the Muslim Seljuk Turks, who now dominated much of western Asia, including Palestine. Medieval Christians had a militant zeal to spread their faith and destroy Islam, through the use of force if necessary, and early Christian thinkers like Augustine of Hippo sanctioned war to defend the faith. Except for Islam, no other world religion maintained a strong missionary impulse to convert the world to what its believers considered the only true faith. Religious beliefs and idealism, often mixed with lust for wealth and land, motivated crusaders. Political rivalries between European leaders also played a role.In 1095 Pope Urban II urged Christian rulers to protect the Christian holy sites, prompting the first of nine crusades by land and sea. Citing stories of Muslim atrocities against Christians, which many historians believe to have been fabri-cated or exaggerated, he proclaimed that the Turks “have completely destroyed some of God’s churches. They ruin the altars with filth and defilement. They are pleased to kill others. And what shall I say about the shocking rape of the women.”13Various kings, nobles, and bishops joined the cause. Crusaders temporarily occupied parts of the Holy Land, including Jerusalem, even establishing crusader-led states, but eventually they were forced out. Other crusaders ransacked Constantinople and Egypt.Looting and pillaging cities, even in Europe, crusaders often slaughtered thousands of Muslims, Jews, and Byzantine Christians, burning mosques and synagogues with people inside. In Germany in 1096 crusaders slaughtered twelve thousand Jews. Many non-Christians viewed crusaders as terrorists. In response, Muslim defenders killed local Christians; Jerusalem’s streets, it was said, ran ankle-deep in blood. In the thirteenth century, crusading energies dissipated, but the remaining bit-ter Christian–Muslim animosity still complicates political and cross-cultural relations today.Some medieval tensions derived from robust intellectual debates, often in universities, involving theologians and philoso-phers. By the twelfth century, guilds of scholars formed centers of higher learning, most famously at Paris, Oxford in England, and Salerno and Bologna (boe-LOAN-yuh) in Italy. Whereas many earlier universities in India and the Islamic world mostly specialized in religious studies while also in some cases offering other subjects as well, European universities, perhaps influenced by universities in Moorish Spain and Sicily, taught both religion and secular knowledge, such as Aristotle’s philosophy, raising eyebrows among church leaders (see Meet the People: Heloise, a French Scholar and Nun). Students learned the “seven liberal arts”—astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, music, grammar, rheto-ric, and logic—before specializing in medicine, law, or philoso-phy. As today, students did not spend all of their time studying. When one student wrote home for money because “the city is expensive and makes many demands,” his father replied: “I have recently learned that you live dissolutely, preferring play to work, and strumming your guitar while others are at their studies.”14Heated debates over faith and reason, often against church opposition, contributed much to later Western thought. Thomas Aquinas (uh-KWINE-uhs) (1225–1274), an Italian Dominican monk and professor at the University of Paris, argued that reason could determine much, even God’s existence, but that eventually a believer had to accept on faith many mys-teries. He also believed that God mandated human domina-tion over nature and that women were passive and incapable of moral perfection. Some thinkers influenced by Aristotle argued that real knowledge came only from direct observation, a posi-tion that supported scientific inquiry.Medieval literature was diverse. The Song of Roland, f rom twelfth-century France, described the great deeds of a loyal knight who died fighting in Charlemagne’s army. But the epic’s warlike tone contrasted with many French lyric poems and sto-ries exalting personal happiness and romantic love in a society that generally arranged marriages. Another story, the Celtic legend of British King Arthur and his court, was addressed by writers all over Europe. In some versions Arthur’s wife, Guinevere (GWIN-uh-veer), and his best friend, Lancelot, fol-low their hearts, becoming doomed lovers. There was also lighter writing, such as this parody of the Christian Apostles’ Creed written by a student more delighted by spirits than by the Spirit: “I believe in the tavern of my host, More than in the Holy Ghost. The tavern will my sweetheart be, and the Holy Church is not for me.”15 It could perhaps have been written by a party-loving and irreverent college student today. Some things never change.

Byzantium, and the eastern European societies it influenced, remained very distinct from western Europe. Despite Christianity and long-standing trade con-nections, deep political, economic, and reli-gious differences separated them and still do. Byzantium demonstrated remarkable longevity, serving as a buffer zone protect-ing central and western Europe against Muslim, Slavic, and Mongol invaders, but, from the eleventh century on, it experi-enced steady political decline until it was finally defeated by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Most Slavic societies in eastern Europe adopted Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and the Russians even-tually created a powerful state.14 -3aByzantium and Its RivalsDespite many misfortunes, Byzantium’s economic and religious strengths enabled it to survive for a long time. Located at a favor-able location astride the principal trade routes between Europe and Asia, and the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, Constantinople’s merchant class remained vital. Traders shipped eastern European slaves, including many Slavs (source of the English term slave) from the Black Sea region, for sale in the Mediterranean. Taxes from these goods and people as well as silk production enriched the treasury, and Byzantine coins were used around Eurasia.With the Byzantine church and state intertwined, Christianity and its rituals influenced all aspects of society, fos-tering lengthy religious ceremonies and an intense prayer life. Unlike in western Europe, governments dominated the church, with rulers regularly interfering in church affairs. Byzantines also engaged in hair-splitting theological disputes, bitterly disagreeing on the use of icons, painted images of holy figures, and over whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from God or from both God and Jesus. Byzantine Christians refused to recognize the bishop of Rome’s supremacy over other bishops. These conflicts over theology and authority spurred the final split between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches, which came when the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople angrily excom-municated each other in 1054.Although the Byzantine church supported male power, a few women achieved political or intellectual influence. Empress Irene, an orphan who married an emperor, ruled Byzantium for two decades (780–802). Although her detractors considered her cruel and ruthless, Irene fostered prosperity, made peace with Muslim states, and temporarily resolved the dispute over icons. Byzantium’s best-known historian, the princess Anna Comnena (1083–1148), studied literature, astronomy, medicine, and Greek philosophy.But the state’s geographical location also proved precari-ous. Byzantium faced nearly continuous pressure from neigh-boring peoples. In the sixth and seventh centuries Sassanian Persians and Byzantines fought wars, weakening both empires and making Arab conquest of their lands easier. Arabs attacked Constantinople in 673 and 717, but the Byzantines survived. For the next three and a half centuries they also faced challenges from various Slavic peoples who migrated into and settled east-ern Europe, dominating this vast region of mountains, forests, and grasslands stretching north from Greece to the eastern Baltic and eastward through Russia. The major Slavic threats came from Bulgars and Serbs. The Byzantine ruler known as “Basil the Bulgar-Slayer” defeated a Bulgar army in 1014, blind-ing fifteen thousand Bulgarian prisoners of war before releasing them to return home. The Bulgar defeat opened the door to Serbs, who set up several small states in the Balkans, sparking conflict with Byzantium. After a series of wars, Ottoman Turks conquered the Serbs in 1459.Byzantine political fortunes declined. In 1071, Norman knights drove Byzantine forces from southern Italy, and in 1091, at the Battle of Manzikert (MANZ-ih-kuhrt), Seljuk Turks seized eastern Anatolia. The shrunken Byzantine ter-ritories now faced regular attacks from both east and west. Turks soon completed the conquest of Anatolia, leaving Constantinople a beleaguered fortress. Desperate Byzantines requested help from western knights to defend them against the Turks; instead, crusader armies occupied Palestine and Syria between 1096 and 1200. The Byzantines also did not expect crusaders in 1204, bribed by the Venetians, Byzantine trading rivals, to use a disputed imperial succession as an excuse to con-quer Constantinople itself, which they governed until forced out in 1261. Capitalizing on these disasters, expanding Ottoman Turks finally conquered Constantinople and the surrounding territory in 1453, ending the Byzantine state and transforming the capital city, which the Turks eventually renamed Istanbul.14 -3bByzantium, Russians, and MongolsByzantine culture and religion spread north and east and survived the empire’s defeats. Differing eastern and western versions of Christianity offered eastern European peoples a choice of which to adopt. In the ninth century, two Byzantine brothers, known later as Saints Cyril and Methodius (mi-THO-dee-uhs), con-verted many Slavs to eastern Christianity. Devising an alphabet, known as Cyrillic (suh-RILL-ik), for the Slavs, Cyril translated the Bible and other church writings from Greek. Bulgars, Serbs, Russians, and many Ukrainians eventually adopted Byzantine culture, including Orthodox Christianity. Russians and other societies they influenced, including Georgians in the Caucasus, embraced ideas such as an autocratic emperor and close church–state relations, in contrast to western Europe, where church–state conflicts remained common. Other Slavs, among them Croats (KRO-ATS), Czechs (checks), Lithuanians (lith-oo-ANE-ee-uhnz), Poles, Slovaks (SLO-vaks), Slovenes (SLO-veenz), and many Ukrainians, adopted Roman Catholicism. Eastern and western European cultures remain distinct even today, partly because of the differences between the Greek and Roman churches of one thousand years ago.Russian identity descended from the Rus (roos), whose capital was eventually at Kiev (KEE-yev), in today’s Ukraine (you-CRANE). Historians debate Rus origins. Small num-bers of Swedish Vikings founded trading cities in the Slavic regions and may have become the Rus ruling class while both trading with and raiding the Byzantines. Viking trade net-works crisscrossed the Russian and Ukrainian plains, spread-ing Scandinavian cultural and linguistic influences around the region. But Slavs eventually assimilated the Vikings. From the tenth to the twelfth centuries, the Russians expanded, form-ing settlements as far north as Novgorod (NOHV-goh-rod)and shipping timber south to the Black Sea. The Rus ruler Vladimir (VLAD-ih-mir) I (ca. 956–1015), in Kiev, had several wives and eight hundred concubines but, hoping for political advantage, sought marriage to a Byzantine princess. After she refused to marry a pagan polygamist, he agreed to accept Orthodox Christianity in 988 and make her his only wife. Ordering his soldiers to be baptized, Vladimir guar-anteed that much of eastern Europe would become Eastern Orthodox.By the time western Europeans heard rumors about the brutal Mongols, the Russians had already encountered them. Mongol armies conquered Central Asia and parts of China and the Middle East (see Chapters 10 and 11 ) and repeatedly sacked Russian cities beginning in 1237. A papal envoy who visited Kiev after an attack reported, “We found lying in the fields countless heads and bones. [The city] has been reduced to nothing: barely 200 houses [still] stand there.”16 Until the fifteenth century most Russians remained subject to the Golden Horde, a Mongol state on the lower Volga River. Muscovy (MUSS-koe-vee), a Russian state centered on Moscow, benefited, since the Golden Horde treated its ruler as the senior Russian leader.Western Europe was fortunate to escape Mongol conquest. In 1241, Mongol armies moved far into Europe, crushing Polish and Hungarian forces sent against them. Standing at the Danube, they contemplated invading German lands. But Mongol generals returned to Mongolia in 1241 when their leader, Ogodei, died, sparing Germans and Europeans farther west. There may have also been other reasons for the sudden retreat besides Mongol politics and perhaps a more effective resistance than the Mongols anticipated. A study in 2016 points to weather, with a severe winter and then rains leading to widespread spring melting, causing flooding and mud, which prevented the growth of the grasses favored by Mongol horses. Whatever the case, had the Mongol conquests continued westward, European history might have been very different. But Europe was much less tempting than far richer China and Islamic western Asia.Eventually Muscovy became the dominant Russian state as Mongol political power declined and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, appointed by the Constantinople patriarch, moved from Kiev to Moscow. Under Ivan III (1440–1505), Muscovy escaped Mongol control and established domination over other Russian states. Ivan began to call himself czar (mean-ing “caesar”), indicating his superiority over lesser rulers, and married the last Byzantine emperor’s niece. The Russian Orthodox Church broke with the patriarch of Constantinople, and Russian clergy referred to Moscow as the Third Rome, suc-cessor to Constantinople. A monastery abbot proclaimed: “The Church of old Rome fell for its heresy; the gates of the Second Rome, Constantinople, were hewn down by the axes of the infi-del Turks; but the Church of Moscow, the Church of the New Rome, shines brighter than the sun in the whole universe.”17Russians also expanded into the territories of the Catholic Lithuanians, adding religious antagonisms to political tensions between Orthodox and Catholic peoples in eastern Europe.

14 - 4

Late Medieval Europe and the Roots of Expansion

The Late Middle Ages (1300–1500) were a period of transition. A dramatic decrease in population as a result of famine, plague, and warfare contributed to feudalism’s gradual end. Royal power increased many places at the expense of the feudal nobility, while the Roman Church also lost influence as questioning of church practices and beliefs increased. Yet, the ferment fostered intel-lectual and cultural creativity, trade expanded, and brave mari-ners began exploring the world beyond Europe. These changes eventually led to the resurgence of the West.14 - 4aThe Black Death and Social ChangeLate medieval Europe was an unhappy place, ravaged by famine, disease, and war. Europe’s climate turned colder about 1300, fostering the “Little Ice Age,” a rapid global cooling probably caused by huge volcanic explosions, which blocked sunlight by lofting dust high into the stratosphere, combined with the sun moving into a less active phase. Sea ice expanded, ocean currents shifted, wind patterns changed, and in some places tor-rential rains alternated with unprecedented drought and famine. Norse farming settle-ments in Greenland collapsed from defor-estation, expanding glaciers, and conflict with the local Inuit. The same cooler temperatures shortened Europe’s growing sea-son, causing serious food shortages and considerable starvation.Soon after the Little Ice Age famine began to dissipate. Europe also repeatedly suffered from the Black Death, the larg-est pandemic (massive epidemic) in world history that crossed many regions from China to England and even apparently into sub-Saharan Africa, named for the black bruises appearing under the skin. In 1347 a Genoese trading ship coming from the Black Sea limped into a bustling Sicilian harbor, the entire crew either dead or dying from a deadly infection. Most studies have blamed the spread on fleas living on rats who had scam-pered aboard ship, but new research in 2018 singles out both body lice and fleas, at least in Europe. The killer was probably bubonic plague, perhaps mixed with pneumonic (noo-MON-ik) plague. The pandemic caused unprecedented death and ter-rible suffering as it spread along and disrupted trade networks all over Eurasia and North Africa. During its peak years from 1348 to 1350, it killed at least a third of all Europeans. Over 65 percent of the population in some congested cities died, greatly reducing commerce; Europe’s population in the four-teenth century dropped from around 70 to 75 million to some 45 to 50 million people, most killed by either a fast-acting respi-ratory infection or by swelling and internal bleeding, a horrible, agonizing, and excruciating death. Pope Clement VI wrote that “the living were barely sufficient to bury the dead, or so horri-fied as to avoid the task. So great a terror seized nearly every-one.”18 The horrors endured in nursery rhymes: “Ring around the rosies, a pocketful of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” Those who survived developed some immunities: the Black Death, reoccurring for decades, killed fewer people each time.The troubles reshaped social patterns, especially for the upper classes, who now faced a labor shortage. With far fewer peasants alive to till the fields or workers to labor in businesses, those remaining asked for more privileges and money. Peasant revolts demanding an end to serfdom increased, most notably in France in 1358 and in England in 1381. With the dark shadow of death always close behind, many people migrated to cities. In the years that followed middle classes began to develop. Meanwhile, some people challenged social norms. In addition to writing works of history, ethics, and poetry, the French author Christine of Pizan (1364–ca. 1430) proclaimed women equal to men, systematically disproved all negative male stereotypes of women’s character, and shrewdly critiqued the patriarchal social structure. She wrote that “those who blame women out of jealousy are those wicked men who have seen many women of greater intelligence and nobler conduct than they themselves possess.”19 Some literature, such as the fiction of the fourteenth-century English writer Geoffrey Chaucer (CHAW-suhr), reflected changing social customs and relations (see Discover Historical Voices: A Literary View of Late Medieval People).Death and despair influenced emotional and social life. Many people assumed the pandemic was God’s punishment. Hopelessness overwhelmed people digging graves for family members before they too succumbed to death, usually within days. While famine and disease raged, aristocrats enjoyed mag-nificent banquets, pageants, and ostentatious clothing. The poor sought escape through prayer, meditation, and self-flagellation, imitating the torture of Jesus by beating themselves with whips until their blood flowed. In some places, people looking for scapegoats blamed outsiders for the troubles. In the mid-1300s thousands of Jews were burned alive or driven out of cities, especially in the German states.The pandemic affected western and eastern Europe dif-ferently. Because eastern Europe had fewer cities and more villages, fewer peasants died. With eastern monarchs weaker, the aristocracy imposed serfdom on many peasants, creating large agricultural estates. In the West, however, nobles were weakened by labor shortages and higher costs. Hence, eastern Europe remained primarily an agricultural area, while western European rulers strengthened their central governments.14 - 4bWarfare and Political CentralizationChronic warfare in late medieval western Europe brought much death and misery but also strengthened kings and states (see Map 14.3). For example, the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), the longest military struggle in history, involved intermittent English–French conflict and enhanced royal power in France and, eventually, England. This war, a dynastic fight caused by the English kings’ desire to hold on to their feudal lands in France, eventually resulted in French triumph. At first the English gained victories by using trained commoners and a new weapon, the longbow, that launched powerful arrows, diminish-ing the knights as an effective fighting force. However, aided by Jeanne d’Arc (zhahn DAHRK) (ca. 1412–1431), a sixteen-year-old peasant who believed saints’ voices told her to lead troops into battle, the French broke the English siege of the city of Orleans (or-lay-AHN) and slowly recovered most English-held territory in France. Jeanne, captured by the English and burned at the stake, became French nationhood’s most famous martyr.During the conflict’s final stages, French monarchs intro-duced new direct taxes, lessening their dependence on the nobility, while reorganizing royal armies by hiring more merce-nary troops. In England, military defeat fostered the War of the Roses (1455–1485) between two rival royal houses. Eventually Henry VII, who founded a new Tudor dynasty, sent armies to reclaim Ireland, followed by English settlers who repressed the Celtic Irish. The Tudors established England as a world power during the 1500s.Royal power increased during the late 1400s in Spain. In 1085 Iberian Christians began the long reconquest of the peninsula from Muslims, by 1249 reclaiming Portugal and by the 1300s displacing all of the Muslim states except Granada (gruh-NAH-duh) in the far south. In 1469 the marriage of King Ferdinand of Aragon (AR-uh-gon) to his cousin, Isabella of Castile (kas-TEEL), united the two largest kingdoms. These monarchs finally crushed Granada in 1492 and then, obsessed with religious uniformity, demanded that Spanish Jews and Muslims either convert to Christianity or be expelled. While many converted, some secretly maintained Jewish or Muslim practices. Jews and Muslims refusing conversion mostly emi-grated to Morocco or the Ottoman Empire. Hoping to increase royal wealth, Ferdinand and Isabella also sponsored the first trans-Atlantic voyage by the Italian mariner Christopher Columbus in 1492. In the past few years, after Spain welcomed Jews back, many descendants of conversos (people who had hidden their Jewish attachments under a Christian facade for generations) took up the offer and have returned to settle, most from Latin America or the U.S. Southwest.Aristocracy remained strong in the Holy Roman Empire, which encompassed many German-speaking lands and parts of Italy. After taking power in 1273, the Habsburg (HABZ-berg)Discover family proved unable to create a strong centralized state. In 1356 they reduced the pope’s influence over electing Holy Roman Emperors but also ratified aristocratic power. During the coming centuries imperial Habsburg rulers concentrated on increasing their family’s personal territorial holdings. In the later 1400s, royal marriage alliances gave them control of the Netherlands and much of southern Italy.14 - 4cHemispheric Connections, New Intellectual Horizons, and TechnologyThe Late Middle Ages fostered new intellectual horizons and technologies, some derived from contacts with Asia and Africa. The Mongols did not conquer western Europe but reenergized Eurasian trade, allowing inventions and ideas to flow to Europe from China and western Asia. Some Chinese inventions, such as printing, gunpowder, and the compass, eventually revolu-tionized European technology. Meanwhile, Italians imported spices, carpets, silks, porcelain, glassware, and even painting sup-plies from Moorish Spain, Ottoman Turkey, Mamluk Egypt, and Persia. The cosmopolitan Ottoman ruler Mehmed the Conqueror (1430–1481) read and published Greek and Latin books on history and philosophy while inviting Italian mer-chants, craftsmen, artists, and architects to work in Istanbul (formerly Constantinople). The magnificent palaces and mosques in Islamic cities influenced some Italians, especially Venetians. By the later 1400s the Portuguese were bringing back artworks and fabrics from West Africa and the Kongo that influenced European artists.Moral and political corruption fostered decline of papal political power and the Roman Church. Some historians argue that power tends to corrupt and the greater the power the greater the corruption. This can apply to religious organiza-tions as well as states. Church dissidents complained about the buying of church offices, favoritism to relatives, and the absen-teeism of bishops who served more than one diocese to collect extra revenue. Detractors of Cardinal Wolsey, archbishop of both Canterbury and York in England, claimed that he entered the cathedral at York only once, for his funeral. Skeptics also viewed practices such as venerating holy relics and making pil-grimages as superstition that encouraged fraud, while defend-ers argued that relics and pilgrimages gave people something tangible to cling to when seeking God’s help.Papal prestige declined after popes moved to Avignon in southern France (1309–1377). Avignon popes required that can-didates for bishop pay a large sum to the papal treasury, hence reserving high church offices for the wealthy. When the papacy finally returned to Rome, two men claimed to be the rightful pope, with Europeans pick-ing sides. Before this “Great Schism” (1378–1417) ended, it badly damaged the papacy’s prestige. After a bishop’s coun-cil tried to replace papal monar-chy with church government by such councils, popes refused to call councils on church reform.Along with church criticism, imported ideas and prod-ucts contributed to the dramatic flowering of arts and learning, later known as the Renaissance, or “rebirth.” The Renaissance began in Italian city-states around 1350 and intensified through the 1400s and 1500s, spreading to other societies. In Florence, artists and thinkers rediscovered Classical Greek and Roman ideas. Renaissance philosophy, called humanism, emphasized humanity, worldly concerns, and reason rather than religious ideals. The books of Dante Alighieri (DAHN-tay ah-lee-GYEH-ree) (1265–1321), especially The Divine Comedy, attacked the pope and promoted vernacular language, in this case Italian, rather than Latin. Painters in Italy, such as Sandro Botticelli (SAHN-dro BOT-i-CHEL-ee) (1445–1510), and in the Netherlands depicted space and the human figure real-istically. Some recent studies have argued that women played a much more prominent role in the resurgence than often rec-ognized, both as creative artists and as patrons of art and lit-erature. For example, Isabella d’Este (1474-1539) was one of the key cultural and political figures of the Italian Renaissance as an art patron and innovative fashion leader for aristocratic and court women in Italy and France. Scholars debate whether the Renaissance undermined medieval worldviews by fostering individualism, secularism, and scientific inquiry or was mainly a cultural movement among a small, privileged elite with little impact on the larger society. Nonetheless, Renaissance artists and writers emphasized tolerance of diverse views and new ideals of beauty, weakening church influence. The Renaissance eventually spread into northern Europe in the 1500s.Extraordinary technological development, aided by imports from other regions, also characterized late medieval Europe. European scholars translated Arab and Greek scientific writings in Muslim Spain, while Asian and Muslim technolo-gies that reached Europe, such as the Chinese spinning wheel and loom, improved textile manufacturing. During the 1300s and 1400s western Europeans also developed better ships, improv-ing Chinese inventions such as the compass and sternpost rud-der and adapting Arab lateen sails. By the 1490s, navigation, sailing, and weaponry advances gave Europeans mastery of the oceans. They also devised time-measuring devices, including mechanical clocks, that allowed people to control and standard-ize units of time.Perhaps the most crucial invention, printing by movable type, allowed information to be produced and dispersed in unlimited quantities. Knowledge of Chinese woodblock print-ing and movable type made of clay and metal, invented centuries earlier (see Chapter 11), may have traveled the trade routes to Europe. By the 1400s Europeans used block printing for books and playing cards, and in 1455 the German goldsmith Johann Gutenberg (yoh-HAHN GOO-ten-burg) (1400–1468) intro-duced the first known metal movable type outside of East Asia, printing a Bible. The printed word became an essential medium of mass communication and no longer the monopoly of the few who could afford expensive hand-copied volumes, undermining both feudalism and the church.Imported technology, especially Chinese gunpowder, made for more lethal warfare. By the 1200s, the Chinese had devel-oped primitive guns capable of ejecting flame and projectiles 40 yards. This and other weapons, reaching Europe during the Mongol era, were then improved, making warfare far deadlier than before. Gunpowder weapons, while killing many knights and nobles in wars, also gave Europeans a huge military advan-tage over societies that did not have them, including those in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas.14 - 4dPopulation and Economic GrowthIncreased agricultural development spurred a population increase of 40 to 50 percent between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, the world’s highest rate. After the Black Death, Europe’s population again increased rapidly, grain production doubled, and many peasants moved into eastern Europe to open lands.Commerce also expanded. Under feudalism and manori-alism, merchants mostly dealt in luxury goods for the aristoc-racy. Indeed, the feudal ethic opposed wealth accumulation and devalued merchants. By the 1300s, however, this feudal ethic was breaking down. As foreign trade expanded, commerce became part of everyday life. Venetian merchants, who had trading posts all around the Middle East and Black Sea, and Genoans distributed valuable spices from India and Southeast Asia. The vast quantity of merchandise, mostly from the East, in fifteenth-century Venice awed observers:It seems as if the whole world flocks here. Who could count the many shops so well furnished that they seem almost warehouses, with so many cloths of every make—tapestry, brocades, carpets of every sort, silks of every kind; and so many warehouses full of spices, groceries and rugs. These things stupefy the beholder.20West African gold, used in coins, treasuries, and jewelry, also stimulated the economy. European merchants borrowed and used Arab trading practices and mathematics. In the early 1200s Fibonacci (fee-bo-NACH-ee), a merchant from Pisa in Italy, wrote of the Arab and Indian numerals and calcula-tions he studied in Algeria, Egypt, and Syria. Soon Venice, Genoa, and Florence adopted his mathematical and commer-cial innovations.Unlike centralized China or the Ottoman Empire, western European cities, located in a politically fragmented region, enjoyed growing political power and were able to bargain with kings for advantages and autonomy. In 1241 various north German cities and towns expanded a trade alliance, the Hanseatic (han-see-AT-ik) League, that eventually included at various times some 165-200 member cities and many trade guilds, including some in Holland, Poland, and as far northeast as Estonia, making it one of the most successful trading blocs in history. It dominated Baltic trade and also controlled its own army and navy, making it almost an independent political power. The League’s innovative methods seemed almost mod-ern and included information-sharing, lines of credit, and a kind of court of appeals for disputes. Somewhat like a much smaller, more limited, and less integrated version of the European Union today, it facilitated the flow of commodities like cloth, luxury goods, timber, corn, grain, and fish between societies in the Mediterranean region, northern Europe, and eastern Europe. However, although the League endured into the 1600s it’s influence waned after 1500 as states became more powerful, religious hostilities and wars fostered instability, new Asian and American trade opportunities arose, and Dutch, Italian, and southern German trading groups became more competitive. These developments gave European merchants a status and power unique in the world. While Chinese merchants, who were often prosperous, had a low ranking in the Confucian social system, were heavily taxed, and faced many restrictions, western European merchants steadily gained influence, becom-ing city political leaders. Governments now supported mer-chants and their interests, fostering a social and institutional structure that encouraged profits. Not everyone approved. The Dutch philosopher Erasmus complained about greed, asking, “When did avarice reign more largely and less punished?”21Nonetheless, late medieval Europeans sparked an economic revolution that fundamentally altered western European life in the 1500s and later spread its influences around the world.14 - 4eThe Portuguese and Maritime ExplorationIn the 1400s a few Europeans, pushed by commercial growth and taking advantage of new maritime and military technolo-gies, began to explore the world beyond Europe by sea. The Portuguese, only recently unified in a kingdom and with a stan-dard of living probably lower than some Africans and Asians, began sailing south seeking slaves, African gold, and other trade goods. Motivated by a missionary desire to outflank Islam and spread Christianity, as well as a compelling appetite for plunder and conquest, they enjoyed the advantage of guns, better ships, and a maritime tradition. They also had a larger strategic pur-pose: finding a way around Africa and sailing directly to fabled Southeast Asia, the source of spices so valued in Europe. Finally, European legends about a great Christian emperor in Africa, “Prester John,” perhaps derived from the Ethiopian king, sug-gested to the Portuguese that they could find a possible ally against Muslims.Hence, in search of “Christians and spices,” the Portuguese began systematically exploring the West African coast in 1420. Their efforts were sponsored by Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), a shipbuilding design and car-tography innovator. Soon Henry’s caravels, small ships that could sail on the ocean and into shallow coastal waters and rivers, discovered Madeira (muh-DEER-uh) Island and the Azores (A-zorz) and Canary Islands in the Atlantic off North Africa. By the 1480s the Portuguese had visited much of Africa’s coast as far south as Angola (see Chapter 12). In 1487 Portuguese ships led by Bartolomeu Dias (DEE-uhsh) reached the Indian Ocean, intensifying Portuguese interest both in Africa and the world to the east. One of the sailors manning Portuguese ships was a Genoese immigrant to Portugal, Christopher Columbus. Columbus had lived on Madeira, where he married the daughter of the wealthy Portuguese governor, and also had visited the Canary and 21Quoted in Edith Simon, The Reformation (New York: Time-Life Books, 1966), 71.

Cape Verde islands, England, Ireland (where he noted two bodies with “strange features” that had washed ashore in Galway Bay), perhaps Iceland, and apparently the coast of West Africa as far south as today’s Ghana. Familiar with the Atlantic winds and currents, Columbus later developed an alternative strategy for reaching the East. In 1492 Columbus, under Spanish sponsorship, sailed west across the Atlantic to the Americas, changing world history forever.The Black Death killed a third of Europe’s people and reduced the power of western European nobles while increasing the power of eastern European nobles.French rulers increased their power in the Hundred Years War, England’s Tudor dynasty later made England a world power, and Spanish Christians gradually drove out the Muslims, while in Germany and Italy the nobility remained strong.The church declined in power and prestige as it came to be seen as corrupt, and the papacy was weakened by the Great Schism.During the Renaissance, artists and writers rediscovered Classical influences and championed worldly concerns, individualism, and realism rather than spirituality.Major technological developments, influenced in part by ideas imported from China and the Muslim world, included the printing press, which further undermined the church, and guns, which killed many in European wars.

Chapter SummaryEuropean societies changed dramatically between 600 and 1500. By mixing Greco-Roman, Christian, and Germanic lega-cies between 500 and 1000, western Europeans constructed new societies based on new values and practices. These societies also acquired knowledge from and traded with the Islamic world, especially Muslim Spain. The major medieval institutions of feudalism, manorialism, and the papacy generated conflict between popes and kings, kings and nobles, nobles and mer-chants, cities and countryside, and Christians and outsiders. The church played a crucial social and political role in European societies. Priests dominated village life, while popes fought her-esy and spurred crusades against Muslims.The social, political, economic, and religious systems of Byzantium were different from those in western Europe. The Byzantine emperors were more powerful and had more control over the church. Eventually the Byzantine Church broke com-pletely with the Roman Church, becoming the Greek Orthodox Church. Byzantium also passed on many traditions to various eastern European societies such as the Russians. Russia later became a strong state with a rival Orthodox Church.Western Europeans were linked by trade networks to other societies of Eurasia and North Africa. These networks, including those formed by the Mongol expansion, allowed the movement from east to west not only of valuable goods, technologies, and ideas but also of diseases such as the Black Death. Between 1300 and 1500 western European states grew larger and, in some cases, more centralized, the church faced decline as a political force, and warfare became more deadly. Sparked in part by Afro-Asian influences, the Renaissance fostered new humanistic ideas and artistic currents, while economic growth and social change enhanced the influence of merchants. In the fifteenth century, aided by Asian and Islamic seafaring technologies, western Europeans began exploring the world.