Over the centuries – even in the present – how have the people living in Europe developed a separate “European” identity by contrasting themselves with an external (and/or internal) “other”, defined religiously, culturally, racially, or any other way?

Modern Asian Studies, 31 (3), July, 1997

Although they still differ considerably in their willingness to acknowledge it, specialists in the history of northwestern Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries are increasingly treating it as the emergence of a new civilization in what had previously been a peripheral region of the Mediterranean-based civilization of the classical west, rather than as a continuation or revival of that civilization itself. The most dynamic regions of the new Europe – northwestern France, Flanders, lowland England, northeastern Spain, northern Italy, southern Italy and Sicily – were all peripheral, both to the long-defunct classical civilization and its direct successors, the Byzantine and Abbasid empires, and to the transitional and much more loosely based ninth and tenth-century empires of the Franks and Saxons (Ottonians). To this, one might add that by the end of the twelfth century the remaining rimlands of the Eurasian continent (in a purely geographical sense) – Scandinavia, including Iceland, and still more the southern coast of the Baltic and the areas dominated by the rivers that drained into it – were developing very rapidly indeed.

The chief source of this dynamism was precisely the concentration of political and economic power on much smaller territorial bases than previously, and the accompanying coalescence of localized societies in widely separated subregions into larger units – politically, culturally, commercially. At the heart of these changes was a combination of newly privileged groups of clerics, soldiers and administrators in the service of ambitious regional potentates, producing a strengthening of judicial and fiscal systems and mechanisms of provincial supervision. The establishment of a universal learned culture, the growth of markets at many levels and their deeper penetration of the structures of rural as well as urban life, stimulated both by rapid intensive and extensive changes in agrarian production and by a dramatic increase in the variety and volume of long-distance trade, were integral and essential to these developments, which were accompanied by long-term demographic growth; it is generally thought that the population of Europe trebled between 1000 and 1250.

The conversion of the region to Christianity, begun when it was imported from the Mediterranean during the Roman period, was completed by the foundation of bishoprics and archbishoprics to serve as centres for the evangelization and organization of eastern and northern Europe. Everywhere the thoroughgoing reorganization of the church on a far more centralized and hierarchical basis than previously, enormously increased the range and penetration of its social, political and cultural influence. A network of true urban centres was formed for the first time in transalpine Europe. Even in Italy (Milan being the only significant exception) the earliest and most dynamic urban centres – Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Amalfi, Salerno – had no important Roman past. The same is true of Barcelona and Dubrovnik (Ragusa), the earliest and most dynamic commercial centres in the western Mediterranean and on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, respectively. It was from the eleventh century, and not before, that northwestern Europe experienced its urban revolution in the full sense of that term. If the Carolingian and Ottonian empires secured legitimation from the perceived successors and representatives of the Roman Empire – the Byzantine (East Roman) emperors and the bishops of Rome – their decay provided space for a renewed and greatly intensified process of political and cultural integration in the form of the nascent nation states of France, England, Scandinavia and the Iberian peninsula and the city republics of northern Italy.

The abundance of new land available for clearance and exploitation, both internally and at the frontiers, and burgeoning urban demand for both agricultural and primary products, was an essential foundation of the vigorous growth of European societies in this period. Effective protection from invasion was secured by the fact that expansion took place precisely into the regions from which invasion had previously come. The former invaders from the north and east were assimilated, while those from the south had troubles of their own to contend with. Nevertheless there was a sustained and accelerating movement towards the political and administrative integration of what had been fragmented, localized units.

The Old English state created by the assimilation of the kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia by the sons and grandsons of Alfred of Wessex was probably the richest and most fiscally sophisticated in tenth-century Europe, but by the early eleventh century its capacity to assert power in the localities had been fatally undermined by repeated invasions. There were clear signs in the middle decades of the century of disintegration into territorial lordships of the kind so much in evidence in the west Frankish kingdom at the same time. The Norman conquest of 1066 – itself a by-product of those same developments – reversed that process and created a powerful centralizing monarchy that by the end of the thirteenth century had established England, within more or less its present boundaries, as a unitary state. Its consequences also included substantial development towards the construction of similarly unitary political entities in Wales, Ireland and Scotland, all fragmented between various “kingdoms” and “nations” at the beginning of this period, and laid the foundations for long-term hegemony over them. Even more spectacular in the eyes of contemporaries was the achievement of the Capetian monarchy, which by the end of the thirteenth century had subdued the numerous warring lordships of eleventh-century west Francia into a single ruthlessly governed kingdom. It may reasonably be said that this pattern offers a salient contrast to that displayed by the imperial heartlands of Germany and Italy during the same period.

At the same time as privileged cores extended their territorial writs, they frequently sought to strengthen their extractive, judicial and military functions and systems of provincial control. That “external expansion and internal reform were mutually reinforcing . . . while the concentration of resources that flowed from better coordination facilitated colonization and conquest” is precisely the argument of one of the most acclaimed works in European medieval history of recent years, Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350. By the end of the twelfth century the Anglo-Norman and Norman-Sicilian kingdoms possessed bureaucracies that were to a recognizable degree staffed by trained professionals exercising a public function, capable of intervening far more rapidly and forcefully in local matters and of tapping the agrarian and commercial activities of their subjects far more effectively than any European monarch could have dreamed of 150 years earlier. More generally the remarkable number of very long reigns in the thirteenth century (56 and 35 years in England, 43 and 44 in France, 63 in Aragon, 35 and 32 in Leon Castile, 54 in Sicily) illustrates a transition from charismatic to bureaucratic monarchy. The extension of the authority of appointed officials over that of hereditary nobles, the standardization of legal custom in royal codes, the closer regulation of religious bodies and of commerce, the increase of central revenue, the tendency to definition of local status by national hierarchies and the resolution of local conflicts by national bodies are the bread and butter of the European political and administrative history of this period.

This was accompanied by the creation of a universal high culture firmly distanced from local society, based on the formalization of teaching and learning in the new institution that became the university, and the comprehensive restatement of Catholic faith and doctrine that it sustained. Its creation marks a sharp divergence from the pattern of relations between religion and society – focused on local centres of piety and charity without systematic hierarchical control over the provision of either learning or religious services that – had hitherto characterized both western Europe and the central Islamic lands: until the twelfth century they resembled each other a good deal more closely in these respects than the traditional historiography of either has usually acknowledged. These developments were under way in most regions between the Rhine River, the Ebro River in the Iberian Peninsula and central Italy in the two or three decades before and after the millennium, and were complete in their essentials by the end of the twelfth century. In this way the surplus of agricultural production and the social differentiation necessary to the establishment (or, in the Mediterranean regions, re-establishment) of citied civilization was secured. The manner in which it was done, and the terms upon which the various parties to the new arrangements defined their future relationships with one another – not through the promulgation of any conscious general plan or policy, but by the accumulation of similar solutions to similar problems – structured the development of European society in the second millennium.

The increasingly widespread use of common rituals, symbols and practices is much taken for granted but examples of it abound. The elevation of the cross as the pre-eminent symbol of Christendom reflected the growing emphasis on the crucifixion of Christ in the new theology, given new universality by the movement for ecclesiastical reform. The programme of that movement was given legislative force for the whole of Latin Christendom in the canons of the General Council of the Church in 1215, the fourth to be convened since 1059, attended by some 1,200 bishops and abbots from all over Europe. These canons specified that clergy should dress so as to set themselves apart from the laity – and that Jews and Muslims should wear distinguishing marks on their clothing. Already by 1215 hundreds of the churches in which the mass was celebrated, not only cathedrals and great abbeys but simple parish churches, were built in the Gothic style, which is the single most familiar and universal legacy of medieval Europe, whereas the Romanesque style that it superseded had developed gradually since Carolingian times, shaped as much by local traditions as by liturgical considerations. Worth noting in view of the autonomy of the new civilization from its distant Mediterranean forebear is that the Gothic style reached Italy only belatedly and on the whole unimpressively.

Lateral integration was no less evident in its secular than in its religious aspect. Territorial expansion was notoriously driven on every frontier by armies of knights identically organized, trained and equipped, and symbolized and secured by the identical castles from which they rode. The knights themselves were recruited from the same heartlands, and often from the same families, as were many of the peasants attracted by promises of land and liberty to bring the new territories under the same plough – the same system of market-oriented cereal agriculture – that supported the urban revolution in the valleys of the Rhine and the Mosel, the Seine, the Loire and the Po. The grain was sold in towns built on the same plans, privileged with the same laws and again often colonized by the same people, as their heartland counterparts and models. In short, in the areas of dress, manners and social conventions it is enough to murmur phrases such as “university”, “chivalry”, “Christian life” to demonstrate that there can be no serious doubt of the creation in this period of a universal and pervasive high culture in Latin Europe. To add the mention of “the bourgeoisie”, and of bread, wine and cloth is to be reminded of the extensive and intensive cultural implications of the rapid growth of a network of markets that was rapidly and decisively extending its regular operations to the daily necessities.

The role of interstate competition, notoriously crucial to the spectacular growth of European commerce, ingenuity and institutions was no less central to the emergence of the European world, especially in respect of the stimulus given to fiscal, administrative and political development by the cost of advanced military technology. There is no doubt that from around the millennium a series of connected military advances, notably the couched lance, the cross-bow and the castle contributed substantially both to social differentiation and administrative growth in the heart of northwest Europe, and to the expansion of Latin Christendom in every direction. Whether military competition between Latin Christendom as a whole and any of its rivals was a significant factor is more difficult to say. There is certainly a case for the view that the raising and equipping of crusading expeditions (a more continuous activity in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe than the conventional reference to the best publicized occasions suggests) represented a demand on fiscal and administrative resources that contributed decisively to their rapid development in the kingdoms of Europe during this period.

The same developments that made Latin the repository and the instrument of the dominant culture made it also a clear and self-consciously asserted conceptual frontier between Latin Christendom and its Celtic, Slav, Greek and Muslim neighbours, and within Latin Christendom, between the elite and the masses. In the twelfth century the words “rusticus”, “paganus”, “hereticus” and “illitteratus” were used, as far as most of us can tell, interchangeably. The vernacular poems and sermons of tenth- and early eleventh-century England are greatly admired today, but those who used Old English – or for that matter Old Norse or Icelandic – as a literary language did so because they or their audience knew no better. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the Occitan language and its literature were clearly identified with the heretical civilization of the Languedoc, which was brutally suppressed in the early years of the thirteenth century by the Albigensian crusade, launched by the papacy. Ernest Gellner’s model of the “agro-literate bureaucracy” describes the society of Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries with great accuracy, in particular, the tension that is implicit between the high culture that was created and promulgated by the new elites and the local or regional values and solidarities that it overrode in the process.

There can be no doubt that the events and developments sketched in this essay had an essential Eurasian context. The appearance of a civilization in northwestern Europe – for the first time, let it be repeated – was an aspect of the general recovery after the decline of late antiquity and the social and cultural deepening of Eurasian civilization that was precipitated by the simultaneous expansion and meeting of the Tang and Islamic worlds. The East Roman (Byzantine) Empire was a full participant in the new world order that followed. Western Europe was not, but its development in the ninth and tenth centuries was continuously and profoundly influenced, if not shaped, by finding itself at the margin of this enormous and rapidly developing trading region. The Vikings, the Rus, Venice and Ottonian Germany were among those who got rich as both traders and raiders. The establishment of the new agrarian regime in western Francia, upon which the urban revolution was founded, arose in part from the loss of this opportunity to gain booty by means of frontier warfare, which had sustained the Carolingian monarchy in its eighth- and ninth-century greatness. That loss both weakened the monarchy and sent the nobility in search of new sources of wealth. Hence, the economic takeoff of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, providing the conditions that allowed northwestern Europe to have become a fully functioning part of an integrated hemispheric trading system by 1250, as Janet Abu-Lughod has documented so thoroughly.

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