Christian Europe Emerges, 600–1200...Emerges, 600–1200 CHAPTER OUTLINE The Byzantine Empire,...

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218 9 Christian Europe Emerges, 600–1200 CHAPTER OUTLINE The Byzantine Empire, 600–1200 Early Medieval Europe, 600–1000 The Western Church Kievan Russia, 900–1200 Western Europe Revives, 1000–1200 The Crusades, 1095–1204 DIVERSITY AND DOMINANCE: Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg and the Christianization of the Scandinavians and Slavs ENVIRONMENT AND TECHNOLOGY: Cathedral Organs 14820_09_218-242_r3ek.qxd 4/2/04 3:32 PM Page 218

Transcript of Christian Europe Emerges, 600–1200...Emerges, 600–1200 CHAPTER OUTLINE The Byzantine Empire,...

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    9 Christian EuropeEmerges, 600–1200

    CHAPTER OUTLINEThe Byzantine Empire, 600–1200

    Early Medieval Europe, 600–1000

    The Western Church

    Kievan Russia, 900–1200

    Western Europe Revives, 1000–1200

    The Crusades, 1095–1204

    DIVERSITY AND DOMINANCE: Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg and the Christianization of the Scandinavians and Slavs

    ENVIRONMENT AND TECHNOLOGY: Cathedral Organs

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  • Christmas Day in 800 found Charles, king of theFranks, in Rome instead of at his palace at Aachenin northwestern Germany. At six-foot-three, Charlestowered over the average man of his time, and hisroyal career had been equally gargantuan. Crownedking in his mid-twenties in 768, he had crisscrossedEurope for three decades, waging war on Muslim in-vaders from Spain, Avar˚ invaders from Hungary, anda number of German princes.

    Charles had subdued many enemies and had be-come protector of the papacy. So not all historiansbelieve the eyewitness report of his secretary and bi-ographer that Charles was surprised when, as the kingrose from his prayers, Pope Leo III placed a new crownon his head. “Life and victory to Charles the August,crowned by God the great and pacific Emperor ofthe Romans,” proclaimed the pope.1 Then, amid thecheers of the crowd, he humbly knelt before the newemperor.

    Charlemagne˚ (from Latin Carolus magnus,“Charles the Great”) was the first in western Europe tobear the title emperor in over three hundred years.Rome’s decline and Charlemagne’s rise marked a shiftof focus for Europe—away from the Mediterraneanand toward the north and west. German custom andChristian piety transformed the Roman heritage to cre-ate a new civilization. Irish monks preaching in Latinbecame important intellectual influences in someparts of Europe, while the memory of Greek and Ro-man philosophy faded. Urban life continued the de-cline that had begun in the later days of the RomanEmpire. Historians originally called this era “medieval,”literally “middle age,” because it comes between theera of Greco-Roman civilization and the intellectual,artistic, and economic changes of the Renaissance inthe fourteenth century; but research has uncoveredmany aspects of medieval culture that are as rich andcreative as those that came earlier and later.

    Charlemagne was not the only ruler in Europe toclaim the title emperor. Another emperor held sway inthe Greek-speaking east, where Rome’s political andlegal heritage continued. The Eastern Roman Empire

    was often called the Byzantine Empire after the sev-enth century, and was known to the Muslims as Rum.Western Europeans lived amid the ruins of empire,while the Byzantines maintained and reinterpretedRoman traditions. The authority of the Byzantine em-perors blended with the influence of the Christianchurch to form a cultural synthesis that helped shapethe emerging kingdom of Kievan Russia. Byzantium’scenturies-long conflict with Islam helped spur thecrusading passion that overtook western Europe inthe eleventh century.

    The comparison between western and easternEurope appears paradoxical. Byzantium inherited arobust and self-confident late Roman society andeconomy, while western Europe could not achievepolitical unity and suffered severe economic decline.Yet by 1200 western Europe was showing renewed vi-tality and flexing its military muscles, while Byzantiumwas showing signs of decline and military weakness.As we explore the causes and consequences of thesedifferent historical paths, we must remember that theemergence of Christian Europe included both devel-opments.

    As you read this chapter, ask yourself the follow-ing questions:

    ● What role did Christianity play in reshaping Euro-pean society in east and west?

    ● How did the Roman heritage differently affect theeast and the west?

    ● How can one compare Kievan Russia’s resemblancesto western Europe and to the Byzantine Empire?

    ● How did Mediterranean trade and the Crusades helprevive western Europe?

    THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE,600–1200

    The Byzantine emperors established Christianity astheir official religion (see Chapter 5). They also rep-resented a continuation of Roman imperial rule andtradition that was largely absent in the kingdoms thatsucceeded Rome in the west. Byzantium inherited im-perial law intact; only provincial forms of Roman law

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  • survived in the west. Combining the imperial role withpolitical oversight over the Christian church, the emper-ors made a comfortable transition into the role of all-powerful Christian monarchs. The Byzantine drama,however, played on a steadily shrinking stage. Territoriallosses and almost constant military pressure from northand south deprived the empire of long periods of peace.

    Having a single ruler endowedwith supreme legal and reli-gious authority prevented thebreakup of the Eastern Em-

    pire into petty principalities, but a series of territoriallosses sapped the empire’s strength. Between 634 and

    An EmpireBeleaguered

    650, Arab armies destroyed the Sasanid Empire andcaptured Byzantine Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia (seeChapter 8). Islam posed a religious as well as a politi-cal challenge. By the end of the twelfth century, sometwo-thirds of the Christians in these former Byzan-tine territories had adopted the Muslim faith (seeMap 9.1).

    The loss of such populous and prosperous provincesshook the empire and reduced its power. Although ithad largely recovered and reorganized militarily by thetenth century, it never regained the lost lands. ThoughCrusaders from western Europe established short-livedChristian principalities at the eastern end of theMediterranean Sea in the eleventh century, the Byzan-tines found them almost as hostile as the Muslims (see

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  • the section below on the Crusades). Eventually the em-pire succumbed to Muslim conquest in 1453.

    The later Byzantine emperors faced new enemies inthe north and south. Following the wave of Germanicmigrations (see Chapter 5), Slavic and Turkic peoples ap-peared on the northern frontiers as part of centuries-long and poorly understood population migrations inEurasian steppe lands. Other Turks led by the Seljuk fam-ily became the primary foe in the south (see Chapter 8).

    At the same time, relations with the popes andprinces of western Europe steadily worsened. In themid-ninth century the patriarchs of Constantinople hadchallenged the territorial jurisdiction of the popes ofRome and some of the practices of the Latin Church.These arguments worsened over time and in 1054 cul-minated in a formal schism˚ between the Latin Churchand the Orthodox Church—a break that has been onlypartially mended.

    Imperial authority and urbanprosperity in the eastern prov-inces of the late Roman Empireinitially sheltered Byzantium

    from many of the economic reverses and populationlosses suffered by western Europe. However, the two re-gions shared a common demographic crisis during asixth-century epidemic of bubonic plague known as “theplague of Justinian,” named after the emperor who ruledfrom 527 to 565. A similar though gradual and less pro-nounced social transformation set in around the sev-enth century, possibly sparked by further epidemics andthe loss of Egypt and Syria to the Muslims. Narrative his-tories tell us little, but popular narratives of saints’ livesshow a transition from stories about educated saints hail-ing from cities to stories about saints who originated aspeasants. In many areas, barter replaced money transac-tions; some cities declined in population and wealth;and the traditional class of local urban notables nearlydisappeared.

    Society andUrban Life

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    C H R O N O L O G YWestern Europe Eastern Europe

    711 Muslim conquest of Spain732 Battle of Tours

    800 Coronation of Charlemagne843 Treaty of Verdun divides Carolingian Empire

    among Charlemagne’s grandsons

    910 Monastery of Cluny founded962 Beginning of Holy Roman Empire

    1054 Formal schism between Latin and OrthodoxChurches

    1066 Normans under William the Conqueror invadeEngland

    1077 Climax of investiture controversy1095 Pope Urban II preaches First Crusade

    634–650 Muslims conquer Byzantine provinces ofSyria, Egypt, and Tunisia

    882 Varangians take control of Kiev

    980 Vladimir becomes grand prince of Kievan Russia

    1081–1118 Alexius Comnenus rules ByzantineEmpire, calls for western military aid againstMuslims

    1204 Western knights sack Constantinople in FourthCrusade

    600

    800

    1000

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  • As the urban elite class shrank, the importance ofhigh-ranking aristocrats at the imperial court and of ru-ral landowners increased. Power organized by familybegan to rival power from class-based officeholding. Bythe end of the eleventh century, a family-based militaryaristocracy had emerged. Of Byzantine emperor AlexiusComnenus˚ (r. 1081–1118) it was said: “He consideredhimself not a ruler, but a lord, conceiving and callingthe empire his own house.”2 The situation of womenchanged, too. Although earlier Roman family life wascentered on a legally all-powerful father, women had en-joyed comparative freedom in public. After the seventhcentury women increasingly found themselves confinedto the home. Some sources indicate that when they wentout, they concealed their faces behind veils. The onlymen they socialized with were family members. Para-

    doxically, however, from 1028 to 1056 women ruled theByzantine Empire alongside their husbands. These socialchanges and the apparent increase in the seclusion ofwomen resemble simultaneous developments in neigh-boring Islamic countries, but historians have not uncov-ered any firm linkage between them.

    Economically, the Byzantine emperors continuedthe Late Roman inclination to set prices, organize grainshipments to the capital, and monopolize trade in lux-ury goods like Tyrian purple cloth. Such government in-tervention may have slowed technological developmentand economic innovation. So long as merchants and pil-grims hastened to Constantinople from all points of thecompass, aristocrats could buy rare and costly goods.Just as the provisioning and physical improvement ofRome overshadowed the development of other cities atthe height of the Roman Empire, so other Byzantinecities suffered from the intense focus on Constantinople.In the countryside, Byzantine farmers continued to useslow oxcarts and light scratch plows, which were effi-cient for many, but not all, soil types, long after farmersin western Europe had begun to adopt more efficienttechniques (see below).

    Because Byzantium’s Roman inheritance remainedso much more intact than western Europe’s, few peoplerecognized the slow deterioration. Gradually, however,pilgrims and visitors from the west saw the reality be-yond the awe-inspiring, incense-filled domes of cathe-drals and beneath the glitter and silken garments of theroyal court. An eleventh-century French visitor wrote:

    The city itself [Constantinople] is squalid and fetidand in many places harmed by permanent darkness,for the wealthy overshadow the streets with buildingsand leave these dirty, dark places to the poor and totravelers; there murders and robberies and othercrimes which love the darkness are committed.Moreover, since people live lawlessly in this city,which has as many lords as rich men and almost asmany thieves as poor men, a criminal knows neitherfear nor shame, because crime is not punished bylaw and never entirely comes to light. In every respectshe exceeds moderation; for, just as she surpassesother cities in wealth, so too, does she surpass themin vice.3

    A Byzantine contemporary, Anna Comnena, the bril-liant daughter of Emperor Alexius Comnenus, expressedthe view from the other side. She scornfully described aprominent churchman and philosopher who happenedto be from Italy: “Italos . . . was unable with his barbaric,stupid temperament to grasp the profound truths of phi-losophy; even in the act of learning he utterly rejected

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  • the teacher’s guiding hand, and full of temerity and bar-baric folly, [believed] even before study that he excelledall others.”4

    Though the greatest Byzan-tine architectural monument,Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia˚(“Sacred Wisdom”) cathedral,

    dates to the reign of Justinian, artistic creativity continu-ally manifested itself in the design and ornamentation ofother churches and monasteries. Byzantine religious art,featuring stiff but arresting images of holy figures againstgold backgrounds, strongly influenced painting in west-ern Europe down to the thirteenth century, and Byzan-tine musical traditions strongly affected the chantingemployed in medieval Latin churches.

    Another important Byzantine achievement dates tothe empire’s long period of political decline. In the ninthcentury brothers named Cyril and Methodius embarkedon a highly successful mission to the Slavs of Moravia(part of the modern Czech Republic). They preachedin the local language, and their followers perfected awriting system, called Cyrillic˚, that came to be used bySlavic Christians adhering to the Orthodox—that is,Byzantine—rite. Their careers also mark the beginningof a competition between the Greek and Latin forms ofChristianity for the allegiance of the Slavs. The use todayof the Cyrillic alphabet among the Russians and otherSlavic peoples of Orthodox Christian faith, and of the Ro-man alphabet among the Poles, Czechs, and Croatians,testifies to this competition (see the section below onKievan Russia).

    EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE,600–1000

    The disappearance of the imperial legal frameworkthat had persisted to the final days of the WesternRoman Empire (see Chapter 5) and the rise of variouskings, nobles, and chieftains changed the legal and polit-ical landscape of western Europe. In region after region,the family-based traditions of the Germanic peoples,which often fit local conditions better than previouspractices, supplanted the edicts of the Roman emperors.

    Fear and physical insecurity led communities toseek the protection of local strongmen. In places where

    CulturalAchievements

    looters and pillagers might appear at any moment, a lo-cal lord with a castle at which peasants could take refugecounted for more than a distant king. Dependency ofweak people on strong people became a hallmark of thepost-Roman period in western Europe.

    In 711 a frontier raiding party ofArabs and Berbers, acting underthe authority of the Umayyadcaliph in Syria, crossed the

    Strait of Gibraltar and overturned the kingdom of theVisigoths in Spain (see Chapter 8). The disunited Euro-peans could not stop them from consolidating their holdon the Iberian Peninsula. After pushing the remainingChristian chieftains into the northern mountains, theMuslims moved on to France. They occupied much of thesouthern coast and penetrated as far north as Tours, lessthan 150 miles (240 kilometers) from the English Chan-nel, before Charlemagne’s grandfather, Charles Martel,stopped their most advanced raiding party in 732.

    Military effectiveness was the key element in the riseof the Carolingian˚ family (from Latin Carolus, “Charles”),first as protectors of the Frankish kings, then as kingsthemselves under Charlemagne’s father Pepin (r. 751–768), and finally, under Charlemagne, as emperors. At thepeak of Charlemagne’s power, the Carolingian Empireencompassed all of Gaul and parts of Germany and Italy,with the pope ruling part of the latter. When Charle-magne’s son, Louis the Pious, died, the Germanic tradi-tion of splitting property among sons led to the Treaty ofVerdun (843), which split the empire into three parts.French-speaking in the west (France) and middle (Bur-gundy), and German-speaking in the east (Germany),the three regions never reunited. Nevertheless, the Car-olingian economic system based on landed wealth anda brief intellectual revival sponsored personally byCharlemagne—though he himself was illiterate—pro-vided a common heritage.

    A new threat to western Europe appeared in 793,when the Vikings, sea raiders from Scandinavia, attackedand plundered a monastery on the English coast, thefirst of hundreds of such raids. Local sources fromFrance, the British Isles, and Muslim Spain attest towidespread dread of Viking warriors descending frommulti-oared, dragon-prowed boats to pillage monaster-ies, villages, and towns. Viking shipbuilders made versa-tile vessels that could brave the stormy North Atlanticand also maneuver up rivers to attack inland towns. Inthe ninth century raiders from Denmark and Norway

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  • harried the British and French coasts (see Diversity andDominance: Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg and theChristianization of the Scandinavians and Slavs) whileVarangians˚ (Swedes) pursued raiding and trading inter-ests, and eventually the building of kingdoms, along therivers of eastern Europe and Russia, as we shall see. Al-though many Viking raiders sought booty and slaves, inthe 800s and 900s Viking captains organized the settle-ment of Iceland, Greenland, and, around the year 1000,Vinland on the northern tip of Newfoundland.

    Vikings long settled on lands they had seized in Nor-mandy (in northwestern France) organized the most im-portant and ambitious expeditions in terms of numbersof men and horses and long-lasting impact. William theConqueror, the duke of Normandy, invaded England in1066 and brought Anglo-Saxon domination of the islandto an end. Other Normans (from “north men”) attackedMuslim Sicily in the 1060s and, after thirty years of fight-ing, permanently severed it from the Muslim world.

    Archaeology and records keptby Christian monasteries andconvents reveal a profoundeconomic transformation that

    accompanied the new Germanic political order. The newrulers cared little for the urban-based civilization ofthe Romans, which accordingly shrank in importance.Though the pace of change differed from region to re-gion, most cities lost population, in some cases becom-ing villages. Roman roads fell into disuse and disrepair.Small thatched houses sprang up beside abandoned vil-las, and public buildings made of marble became dilapi-dated in the absence of the laborers, money, and civicleadership needed to maintain them. Paying for pur-chases in coin largely gave way to bartering goods andservices.

    Trade across the Mediterranean did not entirelystop after the Muslim conquests; occasional shipmentsfrom Egypt and Syria continued to reach western ports.But most of western Europe came to rely on meager lo-cal resources. These resources, moreover, underwentredistribution.

    Roman centralization had channeled the wealth andproduction of the empire to the capital, which in turnradiated Roman cultural styles and tastes to the prov-inces. As Roman governors were replaced by Germanicterritorial lords who found the riches of their own cul-ture more appealing than those of Rome, local self-

    A Self-SufficientEconomy

    sufficiency became more important. The decline of liter-acy and other aspects of Roman life made room for thegrowth of Germanic cultural traditions.

    The diet in the northern countries featured beer,lard or butter, and bread made of barley, rye, or wheat, allsupplemented by pork from herds of swine fed on forestacorns and beechnuts, and by game from the sameforests. Nobles ate better than peasants, but even thepeasant diet was reasonably balanced. The Roman dietbased on wheat, wine, and olive oil persisted in the south.The average western European of the ninth century wasprobably better nourished than his or her descendantsthree hundred years later, when population was increas-ing and the nobility monopolized the resources of theforests.

    In both north and south, self-sufficient farming es-tates known as manors became the primary centers ofagricultural production. Fear of attack led many com-mon farmers in the most vulnerable regions to give theirlands to large landowners in return for political andphysical protection. The warfare and instability of thepost-Roman centuries made unprotected country housesespecially vulnerable to pillaging. Isolated by poor com-munications and lack of organized government, land-owners depended on their own resources for survival.Many became warriors or maintained a force of armedmen. Others swore allegiance to landowners who hadarmed forces to protect them.

    A well-appointed manor possessed fields, gardens,grazing lands, fish ponds, a mill, a church, workshopsfor making farm and household implements, and a vil-lage where the farmers dependent on the lord of themanor lived. Depending on local conditions, protectionranged from a ditch and wooden stockade to a stone wallsurrounding a fortified keep (a stone building). Fortifica-tion tended to increase until the twelfth century, whenstronger monarchies made it less necessary.

    Manor life reflected personal status. Nobles andtheir families exercised almost unlimited power over theserfs—agricultural workers who belonged to the manor,tilled its fields, and owed other dues and obligations.Serfs could not leave the manor where they were bornand attach themselves to another lord. Most peasants inEngland, France, and western Germany were unfreeserfs in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In Bordeaux˚,Saxony, and a few other regions free peasantry survivedbased on the egalitarian social structure of the Germanicpeoples during their period of migration. Outright slav-ery, the mainstay of the Roman economy (see Chapter

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  • 5), diminished as more and more peasants became serfsin return for a lord’s protection. The enslavement of pris-oners to serve as laborers became less important as anobject of warfare.

    Europe’s reversion to a self-sufficient economy limited thefreedom and potential for per-sonal achievement of most peo-ple, but an emerging class of

    nobles reaped great benefits. During the Germanic mi-grations and later among the Vikings of Scandinavia,men regularly answered the call to arms issued by warchiefs, to whom they swore allegiance. All warriorsshared in the booty gained from raiding. As settlementenhanced the importance of agricultural tasks, layingdown the plow and picking up the sword at the chief-tain’s call became harder.

    Those who, out of loyalty or desire for adventure,continued to join the war parties included a growingnumber of horsemen. Mounted warriors became thecentral force of the Carolingian army. At first, fightingfrom horseback did not make a person either a noble-man or a landowner. By the tenth century, however,nearly constant warfare to protect land rights or supportthe claims of a lord brought about a gradual transforma-tion in the status of the mounted warrior, which led, atdifferent rates in different areas, to landholding becom-ing almost inseparable from military service.

    In trying to understand long-standing traditions oflandholding and obligation, lawyers in the sixteenth cen-tury and later simplified thousands of individual agree-ments into a neat system they called “feudalism,” fromLatin feodum, meaning a land awarded for military ser-vice. It became common to refer to medieval Europe asa “feudal society” in which kings and lords gave land to“vassals” in return for sworn military support. By analyz-ing original records, more recent historians have discov-ered this to be an oversimplification. Relations betweenlandholders and serfs and between lords and vassals dif-fered too much from one place to another, and from onetime to another, to fit together in anything resembling asystem.

    The German foes of the Roman legions had equippedthemselves with helmets, shields, and swords, spears, orthrowing axes. Some rode horses, but most fought onfoot. Before the invention of the stirrup by Central Asianpastoralists in approximately the first century C.E., horse-men had gripped their mounts with their legs and foughtwith bows and arrows, throwing javelins, stabbing spears,and swords. Stirrups allowed a rider to stand in the sad-

    Early MedievalSociety in theWest

    dle and absorb the impact when his lance struck an en-emy at full gallop. This type of warfare required grain-fedhorses that were larger and heavier than the small, grass-fed animals of the Central Asian nomads, though smallerand lighter than the draft horses bred in later times forhauling heavy loads. Thus agricultural Europe ratherthan the grassy steppes produced the charges of armoredknights that came to dominate the battlefield.

    By the eleventh century, the knight, called by differ-ent terms in different places, had emerged as the centralfigure in medieval warfare. He wore an open-faced hel-met and a long linen shirt, or hauberk˚, studded withsmall metal disks. A century later, knightly equipmentcommonly included a visored helmet that covered thehead and neck and a hauberk of chain mail.

    Each increase in armor for knight and horse entaileda greater financial outlay. Since land was the basis ofwealth, a knight needed financial support from land rev-enues. Accordingly, kings began to reward armed servicewith grants of land from their own property. Lesser no-bles with extensive properties built their own militaryretinues the same way.

    A grant of land in return for a pledge to provide mil-itary service was often called a fief. At first, kings grantedfiefs to their noble followers, known as vassals, on a tem-porary basis. By the tenth century, most fiefs could beinherited as long as the specified military service contin-ued to be provided. Though patterns varied greatly, theassociation of landholding with military service madethe medieval society of western Europe quite differentfrom the contemporary city-based societies of the Is-lamic world.

    Kings and lords might be able to command the ser-vice of their vassals for only part of the year. Vassals couldhold land from several different lords and owe loyaltyto each one. Moreover, the allegiance that a vassal owedto one lord could entail military service to that lord’smaster in time of need.

    A “typical” medieval realm—actual practices variedbetween and within realms—consisted of lands directlyowned by a king or a count and administered by his royalofficers. The king’s or count’s major vassals held and ad-ministered other lands, often the greater portion, in re-turn for military service. These vassals, in turn, grantedland to their own vassals.

    The lord of a manor provided governance and jus-tice, direct royal government being quite limited. Theking had few financial resources and seldom exercisedlegal jurisdiction at a local level. Members of the clergy,as well as the extensive agricultural lands owned by

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    Adam of Bremen’s History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, consists of four sections. The third is devotedto the Archbishop Adalbert, whose death in 1072 stirredAdam to write. References to classical poets, the lives ofsaints, and royal documents show that Adam, a churchman,had a solid education and access to many sources. He alsodrew on living informants, in particular the Danish kingSvein Estrithson, a nephew of Canute, king of England from1015 to 1035, and father-in-law of Gottschalk, a lord overthe Slavs mentioned below. The excerpts below illustrate theclose connection between political and religious institutionsin establishing a structure of domination in lands on the Eu-ropean frontier.

    Archbishop Adalbert held the see for twenty-nine years. Hereceived the pastoral staff from the [Holy Roman] EmperorHenry, the son of Conrad, who was, counting from CaesarAugustus, the ninetieth Roman emperor to sit upon thethrone . . . The archiepiscopal pallium [i.e., bishop’s cloak]was brought to him . . . by legates from the Pope Bene-dict . . . [who] was the one hundred and forty-seventh afterthe Apostles in the succession of Roman pontiffs. His conse-cration took place in Aachen in the presence of Caesar and ofthe princes of the realm. Twelve bishops assisted and laidtheir hands on him . . .

    This remarkable man may for all that be extolled withpraise of every kind in that he was noble, handsome, wise,eloquent, chaste, temperate. All these qualities he comprisedin himself and others besides, such as one is wont to attachto the outer man: that he was rich, that he was successful,that he was glorious, that he was influential. All these thingswere his in abundance. Moreover, in respect of the mission tothe heathen, which is the first duty of the Church at Ham-burg, no one so vigorous could ever be found . . . Althoughhe was such in the beginning, he seemed to fail toward theend. Not being well on his guard against any defect in hisvirtue, the man met with ruin as much through his own neg-ligence as through the driving malice of others . . .

    Keen and well trained of mind, he was skillful in manyarts. In things divine and human he was possessed of great

    prudence and was well known for retaining in memory andsetting forth with matchless eloquence what he had ac-quired by hearing or by study. Then, besides, although hand-some in physical form, he was a lover of chastity. Hisgenerosity was of a kind that made him regard asking favorsas unworthy, that made him slow and humble in acceptingthem but prompt and cheerful in giving, often generously, tothose who had not asked. His humility appears doubtful inthat he exhibited it only in respect of the servants of God,the poor, and pilgrims, and it went to such lengths that be-fore retiring he often would on bended knees personallywash the feet of thirty or more beggars. To the princes of theworld, however, and to his peers he would in no way stoop.Toward them he even broke out at times with a vehemencethat at last spared no one he thought outstanding. Somehe upbraided for luxury, others for greed, still others forinfidelity . . .

    On seeing that the basilica [i.e., cathedral] which hadlately been started was an immense structure requiring verygreat resources, he with too precipitate judgment immedi-ately had the city wall, begun by his predecessors, pulleddown, as if it were not at all necessary, and ordered its stonesbuilt into the temple. Even the beautiful tower, . . . fitted outwith seven chambers, was then razed to its foundations . . .Alebrand before him had begun [the cathedral] in the styleof the church at Cologne [in western Germany], but heplanned to carry it out in the manner of the cathedral atBenevento [in southern Italy] . . .

    And because the great prelate saw that his Church andbishopric . . . was troubled again by the iniquitous might ofthe dukes, he made a supreme effort to restore to thatChurch its former freedom, that thus neither the duke northe count nor any person of judicial position would have anyright or power in his diocese. But this objective could not beattained without incurring hatred, since the wrath of theprinces, rebuked for their wickedness, would be further in-flamed. And they say that Duke Bernhard, who held the arch-bishop under suspicion because of his nobility and wisdom,often said that Adalbert had been stationed in this countrylike a spy, to betray the weaknesses of the land to the aliens

    D I V E R S I T Y A N D D O M I N A N C EARCHBISHOP ADALBERT OF HAMBURG AND THE

    CHRISTIANIZATION OF THE SCANDINAVIANS AND SLAVS

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    and to Caesar. Consequently the duke declared that as longas he or any of his sons lived, the bishop should not have ahappy day in the bishopric . . .

    As soon as the metropolitan [i.e., Archbishop Adalbert]had entered upon his episcopate, he sent legates to the kingsof the north in the interest of friendship. There were also dis-persed throughout all Denmark and Norway and Sweden andto the ends of the earth admonitory letters in which he ex-horted the bishops and priests living in those parts . . . fear-lessly to forward the conversion of the pagans . . . [Svein, theDanish king who died after invading England in 1013 and lefthis throne to his son Canute] forgot the heavenly King asthings prospered with him and married a blood relative fromSweden. This mightily displeased the lord archbishop, whosent legates to the rash king, rebuking him severely for hissin, and who stated finally that if he did not come to hissenses, he would have to be cut off with the sword of ex-communication. Beside himself with rage, the king thenthreatened to ravage and destroy the whole diocese of Ham-burg. Unperturbed by these threats, our archbishop, reprov-ing and entreating, remained firm, until at length the Danishtyrant was prevailed upon by letters from the pope to givehis cousin a bill of divorce. Still the king would not give earto the admonitions of the priests. Soon after he had putaside his cousin he took to himself other wives and concu-bines, and again still others . . .

    While these events were taking place there, the mostChristian king of the Swedes, James, departed this world, andhis brother, Edmund the Bad, succeeded him. He was born ofa concubine by Olaf [the Lapp King] and, although he hadbeen baptized, took little heed of our religion. He had withhim a certain bishop named Osmund, of irregular status,whom the bishop of the Norwegians, Sigefrid, had oncecommended to the school at Bremen for instruction. Butlater he forgot these kindnesses and went to Rome for con-secration. When he was rejected there, he wandered aboutthrough many parts and so finally secured consecration froma Polish archbishop. Going to Sweden then, he boasted thathe had been consecrated archbishop for those parts. Butwhen our archbishop sent his legates to King [Edmund], theyfound this same vagabond Osmund there, having the crossborne before him after the manner of an archbishop. Theyalso heard that he had by his unsound teaching of our faithcorrupted the barbarians, who were still neophytes [i.e.,beginners] . . .

    In Norway . . . King Harold surpassed all the madness oftyrants in his savage wildness. Many churches were de-stroyed by that man; many Christians were tortured to deathby him. But he was a mighty man and renowned for the vic-tories he had previously won in many wars with barbarians inGreece and in the Scythian regions [i.e., while assisting theByzantine empress Zoë fight the Seljuk Turks]. After he cameinto his fatherland, however, he never ceased from warfare;

    he was the thunderbolt of the north . . . And so, as he ruledover many nations, he was odious to all on account of hisgreed and cruelty. He also gave himself up to the magic artsand, wretched man that he was, did not heed the fact thathis most saintly brother [i.e., Saint Olaf, one of Harold’s pred-ecessors] had eradicated such illusions from the realm andstriven even unto death for the adoption of the precepts ofChristianity . . .

    Across the Elbe [i.e., east of the river Hamburg is on] andin Slavia our affairs were still meeting with great success. ForGottschalk . . . married a daughter of the Danish king and sothoroughly subdued the Slavs that they feared him like aking, offered to pay tribute, and asked for peace with sub-jection. Under these circumstances our Church at Hamburgenjoyed peace, and Slavia abounded in priests and churches . . .Gottschalk is said to have been inflamed with such ardentzeal for the faith that, forgetting his station, he frequentlymade discourse in church in exhortation of the people—inchurch because he wished to make clearer in the Slavicspeech what was abstrusely preached by the bishops orpriests. Countless was the number of those who were con-verted every day; so much so that he sent into every provincefor priests. In the several cities were then also foundedmonasteries for holy men who lived according to canonicalrule . . .

    I have also heard the most veracious king of the Danessay . . . that the Slavic peoples without doubt could easilyhave been converted to Christianity long ago but for theavarice of the Saxons. “They are,” he said, “more intent onthe payment of tribute than on the conversion of the hea-then.” Nor do these wretched people realize with what greatdanger they will have to atone for their cupidity, they whothrough their avarice in the first place threw Christianity inSlavia into disorder, in the second place have by their crueltyforced their subjects to rebel, and who now by their desireonly for money hold in contempt the salvation of a peoplewho wish to believe” . . .

    QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS1. Using this work as a historical source, what would you

    consider the main concerns of the church in northernGermany?

    2. How does Adam distinguish Christians from pagans inhis descriptive passages?

    3. What appears to be the relationship between ecclesias-tical lords like the archbishop and the secular kings anddukes?

    Source: Excerpts from History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, tr. Francis J.Tschan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959 [new ed. 2002]), 114–133. Reprintedwith the permission of the publisher.

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  • monasteries and nunneries, fell under the jurisdiction ofthe church, which further limited the reach and author-ity of the monarch.

    Noblewomen became enmeshed in this tangle ofobligations as heiresses and as candidates for marriage.A man who married the widow or daughter of a lord withno sons could gain control of that lord’s property. Mar-riage alliances affected entire kingdoms. Noble daugh-ters and sons had little say in marriage matters; issues ofland, power, and military service took precedence. No-blemen guarded the women in their families as closelyas their other valuables.

    Nevertheless, women could own land. A noble-woman sometimes administered her husband’s estateswhen he was away at war. Nonnoble women usuallyworked alongside their menfolk, performing agriculturaltasks such as raking and stacking hay, shearing sheep,and picking vegetables. As artisans, women spun, wove,and sewed clothing. The Bayeux˚ Tapestry, a piece ofembroidery 230 feet (70 meters) long and 20 inches(51 centimeters) wide depicting William the Conqueror’s

    invasion of England in 1066, was designed and executedentirely by women, though historians do not agree onwho those women were.

    THE WESTERN CHURCH

    Just as the Christian populations in eastern Europe fol-lowed the religious guidance of the patriarch of Con-stantinople appointed by the Byzantine emperor, so thepope commanded similar authority over church affairsin western Europe. And just as missionaries in the eastspread Christianity among the Slavs, so missionaries inthe west added territory to Christendom with forays intothe British Isles and the lands of the Germans. Through-out the period covered by this chapter Christian societywas emerging and changing in both areas.

    In the west Roman nobles lost control of thepapacy—the office of the pope—and it became a morepowerful international office after the tenth century.Councils of bishops—which normally set rules, calledcanons, to regulate the priests and laypeople (men and

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  • women who were not members of the clergy) under theirjurisdiction—became increasingly responsive to papaldirection.

    Nevertheless, regional disagreements over churchregulations, shortages of educated and trained clergy,difficult communications, political disorder, and thegeneral insecurity of the period posed formidable obsta-cles to unifying church standards and practices. Clericsin some parts of western Europe were still issuing prohi-bitions against the worship of rivers, trees, and moun-tains as late as the eleventh century. Church problemsincluded lingering polytheism, lax enforcement of pro-hibitions against marriage of clergy, nepotism (givingpreferment to one’s close kin), and simony (selling ec-clesiastical appointments, often to people who were notmembers of the clergy). The persistence of the papacyin asserting its legal jurisdiction over clergy, combatingpolytheism and heretical beliefs, and calling on secularrulers to recognize the pope’s authority, including un-popular rulings like a ban on first-cousin marriage, con-stituted a rare force for unity and order in a time ofdisunity and chaos.

    In politically fragmented west-ern Europe, the pope neededallies. Like his son, Charle-magne’s father Pepin was a

    strong supporter of the papacy. The relationship be-tween kings and popes was tense, however, since boththought of themselves as ultimate authorities. In 962 thepope crowned the first “Holy Roman Emperor” (Charle-magne never held this full title). This designation of asecular political authority as the guardian of generalChristian interests proved more apparent then real. Es-sentially a loose confederation of German princes whonamed one of their own to the highest office, the HolyRoman Empire had little influence west of the RhineRiver.

    Although the pope crowned the early Holy Romanemperors, this did not signify political superiority. Thelaw of the church (known as canon law because each lawwas called a canon) gave the pope exclusive legal ju-risdiction over all clergy and church property whereverlocated. But bishops who held land as vassals owed mil-itary support or other services and dues to kings andprinces. The secular rulers argued that they should havethe power to appoint those bishops because that was theonly way to guarantee fulfillment of their duties as vas-sals. The popes disagreed.

    In the eleventh century, this conflict over the con-trol of ecclesiastical appointments came to a head.

    Politics and theChurch

    Hildebrand˚, an Italian monk, capped a career of reor-ganizing church finances when the cardinals (a group ofsenior bishops) meeting in Rome selected him to bePope Gregory VII in 1073. His personal notion of the pa-pacy (preserved among his letters) represented an ex-treme position, stating among other claims, that

    § The pope can be judged by no one;§ The Roman church has never erred and never will

    err till the end of time;§ The pope alone can depose and restore bishops;§ He alone can call general councils and authorize

    canon law;§ He can depose emperors;§ He can absolve subjects from their allegiance;§ All princes should kiss his feet.5

    Such claims antagonized lords and monarchs, whohad become accustomed to investing—that is, conferringa ring and a staff as symbols of authority on bishops andabbots in their domains. Historians apply the term in-vestiture controversy to the medieval struggle betweenthe church and the lay lords to control ecclesiastical ap-pointments; the term also refers to the broader conflictof popes versus emperors and kings. When Holy RomanEmperor Henry IV defied Gregory’s reforms, Gregoryexcommunicated him in 1076, thereby cutting him offfrom church rituals. Stung by the resulting decline in hisinfluence, Henry stood barefoot in the snow for threedays outside a castle in northern Italy waiting for Greg-ory, a guest there, to receive him. Henry’s formal act ofpenance induced Gregory to forgive him and restore himto the church; but the reconciliation, an apparent vic-tory for the pope, did not last. In 1078 Gregory declaredHenry deposed. The emperor then forced Gregory to fleefrom Rome to Salerno, where he died two years later.

    The struggle between the popes and the emperorscontinued until 1122, when a compromise was reachedat Worms, a town in Germany. In the Concordat ofWorms, Emperor Henry V renounced his right to choosebishops and abbots or bestow spiritual symbols uponthem. In return, Pope Calixtus II permitted the emperorto invest papally appointed bishops and abbots with anylay rights or obligations before their spiritual consecra-tion. Such compromises did not fully solve the problem,but they reduced tensions between the two sides.

    Assertions of royal authority triggered other con-flicts as well. Though barely twenty when he becameking of England in 1154, Henry II, a great-grandson ofWilliam the Conqueror, instituted reforms designed tostrengthen the power of the Crown and weaken the

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  • nobility. He appointed traveling justices to enforce hislaws. He made juries, a holdover from traditional Ger-manic law, into powerful legal instruments. He estab-lished the principle that criminal acts violated the “king’speace” and should be tried and punished in accordancewith charges brought by the Crown instead of in re-sponse to charges brought by victims.

    Henry had a harder time controlling the church. Hisclosest friend and chancellor, or chief administrator,Thomas à Becket (ca. 1118–1170), lived the grand andluxurious life of a courtier. In 1162 Henry persuadedBecket to become a priest and assume the position ofarchbishop of Canterbury, the highest church office inEngland. Becket agreed but cautioned that from then onhe would act solely in the interest of the church if it cameinto conflict with the Crown. When Henry sought to tryclerics accused of crimes in royal instead of ecclesiasticalcourts, Archbishop Thomas, now leading an austere andpious life, resisted.

    In 1170 four of Henry’s knights, knowing that theking desired Becket’s death, murdered the archbishop inCanterbury Cathedral. Their crime backfired, and anoutpouring of sympathy caused Canterbury to become amajor pilgrimage center. In 1173 the pope declared themartyred Becket a saint. Henry allowed himself to bepublicly whipped twice in penance for the crime, but hisauthority had been badly damaged.

    Henry II’s conflict with Thomas à Becket, like theConcordat of Worms, yielded no clear victor. The prob-lem of competing legal traditions made political life inwestern Europe more complicated than in Byzantium orthe lands of Islam (see Chapter 8). Feudal law, rooted inGermanic custom, gave supreme power to the king.Canon law, based on Roman precedent, visualized a sin-gle hierarchical legal institution with jurisdiction over allof Western Christendom. In the eleventh century Romancivil law, contained in the Corpus Juris Civilis (see Chap-ter 5), added a third tradition.

    Monasticism featured promi-nently in the religious life ofalmost all medieval Christian

    lands. The origins of group monasticism lay in the east-ern lands of the Roman Empire. Pre-Christian practicessuch as celibacy, continual devotion to prayer, and livingapart from society (alone or in small groups) came to-gether in Christian form in Egypt.

    The most important form of monasticism in west-ern Europe, however, involved groups of monks or nunsliving together in organized communities. The personmost responsible for introducing this originally Egyp-

    Monasticism

    tian practice in the Latin west was Benedict of Nursia(ca. 480–547) in Italy. Benedict began his pious careeras a hermit in a cave but eventually organized severalmonasteries, each headed by an abbot. In the seventhcentury monasteries based on his model spread far be-yond Italy. The Rule Benedict wrote to govern the monks’behavior envisions a balanced life of devotion and work,along with obligations of celibacy, poverty, and obedi-ence to the abbot. Those who lived by this or othermonastic rules became regular clergy, in contrast to sec-ular clergy, priests who lived in society instead of inseclusion and did not follow a formal code of regula-tions. The Rule of Benedict was the starting point formost forms of western European monastic life and re-mains in force today in Benedictine monasteries.

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  • Though monks and nuns, women who lived bymonastic rules in convents, made up a small percentageof the total population, their secluded way of life rein-forced the separation of religious affairs from ordinarypolitics and economics. Monasteries followed Jesus’ ax-iom to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and untoGod what is God’s” better than the many town-basedbishops who behaved like lords.

    Monasteries preserved literacy and learning in theearly medieval period, although some rulers, like Charle-magne, encouraged scholarship at court. Many illiteratelay nobles interested themselves only in warfare andhunting. Monks (but seldom nuns) saw copying manu-scripts and even writing books as a religious calling.Monastic scribes preserved many ancient Latin worksthat would otherwise have disappeared. The survival ofGreek works depended more on Byzantine and Muslimscribes in the east.

    Monasteries and convents served other functions aswell (see Environment and Technology: Cathedral Or-gans). A few planted Christianity in new lands, as Irishmonks did in parts of Germany. Most serviced the needsof travelers, organized agricultural production on theirlands, and took in infants abandoned by their parents.Convents provided refuge for widows and other womenwho lacked male protection in the harsh medieval worldor who desired a spiritual life. These religious housespresented problems of oversight to the church, however.A bishop might have authority over an abbot or abbess(head of a convent), but he could not exercise constantvigilance over what went on behind monastery walls.

    The failure of some abbots to maintain monastic dis-cipline led to the growth of a reform movement centeredon the Benedictine abbey of Cluny˚ in eastern France.Founded in 910 by William the Pious, the first duke ofAquitaine, who completely freed it of lay authority, Clunygained similar freedom from the local bishop a centurylater. Its abbots pursued a vigorous campaign, eventuallyin alliance with reforming popes like Gregory VII, to im-prove monastic discipline and administration. A mag-nificent new abbey church symbolized Cluny’s claimsto eminence. With later additions, it became the largestchurch in the world.

    At the peak of Cluny’s influence, nearly a thousandBenedictine abbeys and priories (lower-level monastichouses) in various countries accepted the authority of itsabbot. The Benedictine Rule had presumed that eachmonastery would be independent; the Cluniac reform-ers stipulated that every abbot and every prior (head of apriory) be appointed by the abbot of Cluny and have

    personal experience of the religious life of Cluny. Monas-tic reform gained new impetus in the second half of thetwelfth century with the rapid rise of the Cistercian or-der, which emphasized a life of asceticism and poverty.These movements set the pattern for the monasteries,cathedral clergy, and preaching friars that would domi-nate ecclesiastical life in the thirteenth century.

    KIEVAN RUSSIA, 900–1200

    Though Latin and Orthodox Christendom followeddifferent paths in later centuries, which had a morepromising future was not apparent in 900. The Poles andother Slavic peoples living in the north eventually ac-cepted the Christianity of Rome as taught by Germanpriests and missionaries (see Diversity and Dominance:Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg and the Christianiza-tion of Scandinavians and Slavs). The Serbs and othersouthern Slavs took their faith from Constantinople.

    The conversion of Kievan Russia, farther to the east,shows how economics, politics, and religious life wereclosely intertwined. The choice of orthodoxy over Catholi-cism had important consequences for later Europeanhistory.

    The territory between the Blackand Caspian Seas in the southand the Baltic and White Seasin the north divides into a se-

    ries of east-west zones. Frozen tundra in the far northgives way to a cold forest zone, then to a more temperateforest, then to a mix of forest and steppe grasslands, andfinally to grassland only. Several navigable rivers, includ-ing the Volga, the Dnieper˚, and the Don, run from northto south across these zones.

    Early historical sources reflect repeated linguisticand territorial changes, seemingly under pressure frompoorly understood population migrations. Most of theGermanic peoples, along with some Iranian and westSlavic peoples, migrated into eastern Europe fromUkraine and Russia in Roman times. The peoples whoremained behind spoke eastern Slavic languages, exceptin the far north and south: Finns and related peopleslived in the former region, Turkic-speakers in the latter.

    Forest dwellers, farmers, and steppe nomads com-plemented each other economically. Nomads traded an-imals for the farmers’ grain; and honey, wax, and furs from

    The Rise of theKievan State

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  • the forest became important exchange items. Traderscould travel east and west by steppe caravan (see Chap-ters 7 and 12), or they could use boats on the rivers tomove north and south.

    Hoards containing thousands of Byzantine and Is-lamic coins buried in Poland and on islands in the BalticSea where fairs were held attest to the trading activityof Varangians (Swedish Vikings) who sailed across theBaltic and down Russia’s rivers. They exchanged forestproducts and slaves for manufactured goods and coins,which they may have used as jewelry rather than asmoney, at markets controlled by the Khazar Turks. Thepowerful Khazar kingdom centered around the mouth ofthe Volga River.

    Historians debate the early meaning of the word Rus(from which Russia is derived), but at some point it cameto refer to Slavic-speaking peoples ruled by Varangians.Unlike western European lords, the Varangian princesand their druzhina (military retainers) lived in cities,while the Slavs farmed. The princes occupied them-selves with trade and fending off enemies. The Rus of thecity of Kiev˚ controlled trade on the Dnieper River anddealt more with Byzantium than with the Muslim worldbecause the Dnieper flows into the Black Sea. The Rus ofNovgorod˚ played the same role on the Volga. The semi-

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    Cathedral Organs

    The Christian church directly encouraged musical develop-ment. Pope Gregory I (d. 604) is traditionally credited withmaking a standard collection of chants then in use. Later, aspecial school in Rome trained choir directors who were sentout to teach the chants in cathedrals and monasteries. Organaccompaniment, initially in the form of long, sustained bassnotes, came into common use by the end of the seventh

    century. The organ worked by directing a current of air to aset of pipes of different lengths that could be opened orclosed at one end. Each pipe sounded a tone as long as theair was flowing past its open end.

    A monk named Wulstan (d. 963) described the organ in-stalled in Winchester Cathedral in England:

    Twice six bellows above are ranged in a row, and four-teen lie below. These, by alternate blasts, supply animmense quantity of wind, and are worked by 70 strongmen, laboring with their arms, covered with perspira-tion, each inciting his companions to drive the wind upwith all his strength, that the full-bosomed box mayspeak with its 400 pipes, which the hand of the organistgoverns. Some when closed he opens, others when openhe closes, as the individual nature of the varied soundrequires. Two brethren of concordant spirit sit at theinstrument . . . Like thunder their tones batter the ear,so that it may receive no sound but that alone. To suchan amount does it reverberate, echoing in every direc-tion, that everyone stops with his hand his gaping ears,being in no wise able to draw near and bear the sound,which so many combinations produce.

    A century later huge levers or keys came into use foropening and closing the pipes. Each was several inches inwidth, one or two inches thick, and up to three feet inlength. So much muscle was required to operate the keysthat organists were called “organ pounders.” Over time, or-gans became smaller and capable of playing magnificentmusic.

    Source: Alexander Russell, “Organ,” The International Cyclopedia of Musicand Musicians, ed. Oscar Thompson (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1943), 1315.

    2nd Pass Pages

    Vladimir (VLAD-ih-mir)

    legendary account of the Kievan Rus conversion to Chris-tianity must be seen against this background.

    In 980 Vladimir˚ I, a ruler of Novgorod who had fallenfrom power, returned from exile to Kiev with a band ofVarangians and made himself the grand prince of KievanRussia (see Map 9.2). Though his grandmother Olga had

    been a Christian, Vladimir built a temple on Kiev’s heightsand placed there the statues of the six gods his Slavic sub-jects worshipped. The earliest Russian chronicle reportsthat Vladimir and his advisers decided against Islam as theofficial religion because of its ban on alcohol, rejected Ju-daism (the religion to which the Khazars had converted)because they thought that a truly powerful god would nothave let the ancient Jewish kingdom be destroyed, and

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  • even spoke with German emissaries advocating LatinChristianity. Why Vladimir chose Orthodox Christianityover the Latin version is not precisely known. The mag-nificence of Constantinople seems to have been a consid-eration. After visiting Byzantine churches, his agentsreported: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or onearth, for on earth there is no such splendor of [sic] suchbeauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We knowonly that God dwells there among men, and their serviceis finer than the ceremonies of other nations.”6

    After choosing a reluctant bride from the Byzan-tine imperial family, Vladimir converted to OrthodoxChristianity, probably in 988, and opened his lands toOrthodox clerics and missionaries. The patriarch of Con-stantinople appointed a metropolitan (chief bishop) atKiev to govern ecclesiastical affairs. Churches arose inKiev, one of them on the ruins of Vladimir’s earlier hilltoptemple. Writing was introduced, using the Cyrillic alpha-bet devised earlier for the western Slavs. This extensionof Orthodox Christendom northward provided a bar-rier against the eastward expansion of Latin Christianity.Kiev became firmly oriented toward trade with Byzan-tium and turned its back on the Muslim world, thoughthe Volga trade continued through Novgorod.

    Struggles within the ruling family and with other en-emies, most notably the steppe peoples of the south,marked the later political history of Kievan Russia. Butdown to the time of the Mongols in the thirteenth century(see Chapter 12), the state remained and served as an in-strument for the Christianization of the eastern Slavs.

    In Kievan Russia political powerderived from trade rather thanfrom landholding, so the ma-norial agricultural system of

    western Europe never developed. Farmers practicedshifting cultivation of their own lands. They would burna section of forest, then lightly scratch the ash-strewnsurface with a plow. When fertility waned, they wouldmove to another section of forest. Poor land and a shortgrowing season in the most northerly latitudes madefood scarce. Living on their own estates, the druzhinaevolved from infantry into cavalry and focused theirefforts more on horse breeding than on agriculture.

    Large cities like Kiev and Novgorod may have reachedthirty thousand or fifty thousand people—roughly thesize of contemporary London or Paris, but far smallerthan Constantinople or major Muslim metropolises likeBaghdad and Nishapur. Many cities amounted to littlemore than fortified trading posts. Yet they served ascenters for the development of crafts, some, such as

    Society andCulture

    glassmaking, based on skills imported from Byzantium.Artisans enjoyed higher status in society than peasantfarmers. Construction relied on wood from the forests,although Christianity brought the building of stonecathedrals and churches on the Byzantine model.

    Christianity penetrated the general populationslowly. Several polytheist uprisings occurred in theeleventh century, particularly in times of famine. Passiveresistance led some groups to reject Christian burial andpersist in cremating the dead and keeping the bones ofthe deceased in urns. Women continued to use polythe-ist designs on their clothing and bracelets, and as late asthe twelfth century they were still turning to polytheistpriests for charms to cure sick children. Traditional Slavicmarriage practices involving casual and polygamous re-lations particularly scandalized the clergy.

    Christianity eventually triumphed, and its successled to increasing church engagement in political andeconomic affairs. In the twelfth century, Christian clergybecame involved in government administration, someof them collecting fees and taxes related to trade. Directand indirect revenue from trade provided the rulers withthe money they needed to pay their soldiers. The rule oflaw also spread as Kievan Russia experienced its peak ofculture and prosperity in the century before the Mongolinvasion of 1237.

    WESTERN EUROPE REVIVES,1000–1200

    Between 1000 and 1200 western Europe slowlyemerged from nearly seven centuries of subsistenceeconomy—in which most people who worked on theland could meet only their basic needs for food, cloth-ing, and shelter. Population and agricultural productionclimbed, and a growing food surplus found its way totown markets, speeding the return of a money-basedeconomy and providing support for larger numbers ofcraftspeople, construction workers, and traders.

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  • Historians have attributed western Europe’s revivalto population growth spurred by new technologies andto the appearance in Italy and Flanders, on the coast ofthe North Sea, of self-governing cities devoted primarilyto seaborne trade. For monarchs, the changes facilitatedimprovements in central administration, greater controlover vassals, and consolidation of realms on the way tobecoming stronger kingdoms.

    A lack of concrete evidenceconfirming the spread of tech-nological innovations frustratesefforts to relate the exact course

    of Europe’s revival to technological change. Neverthe-less, most historians agree that technology played a sig-nificant role in the near doubling of the population ofwestern Europe between 1000 and 1200. The populationof England seems to have risen from 1.1 million in 1086to 1.9 million in 1200, and the population of the territoryof modern France seems to have risen from 5.2 million to9.2 million over the same period.

    Examples that illustrate the difficulty of drawing his-torical conclusions from scattered evidence of techno-logical change were a new type of plow and the use ofefficient draft harnesses for pulling wagons. The Romanplow, which farmers in southern Europe and Byzantiumcontinued to use, scratched shallow grooves, as wasappropriate for loose, dry Mediterranean soils. The newplow cut deep into the soil with a knife-like blade, whilea curved board mounted behind the blade lifted the cutlayer and turned it over. This made it possible to farm theheavy, wet clays of the northern river valleys. Pulling thenew plow took more energy, which could mean harness-ing several teams of oxen or horses.

    Horses plowed faster than oxen but were more deli-cate. Iron horseshoes, which were widely adopted in thisperiod, helped protect their feet, but like the plow itself,they added to the farmer’s expenses. Roman horse har-nesses, inefficiently modeled on the yoke used for oxen,put such pressure on the animal’s neck that a horsepulling a heavy load risked strangulation. A mystery sur-rounds the adoption of more efficient designs. The horsecollar, which moves the point of traction from the ani-mal’s throat to its shoulders, first appeared around 800 ina miniature painting, and it is shown clearly as a harnessfor plow horses in the Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered af-ter 1066. The breast-strap harness, which is not as welladapted for the heaviest work but was preferred insouthern Europe, seems to have appeared around 500.In both cases, linguists have tried to trace key technicalterms to Chinese or Turko-Mongol words and have ar-gued for technological diffusion across Eurasia. Yet third-

    The Role ofTechnology

    century Roman farmers in Tunisia and Libya used bothtypes of harness to hitch horses and camels to plows andcarts. This technology, which is still employed in Tunisia,appears clearly on Roman bas-reliefs and lamps; butthere is no more evidence of its movement northwardinto Europe than there is of similar harnessing movingacross Asia. Thus the question of where efficient har-nessing came from and whether it began in 500 or in 800,or was known even earlier but not extensively used, can-not be easily resolved.

    Hinging on this problem is the question of when andwhy landowners in northern Europe began to use teamsof horses to pull plows through moist, fertile river-valleysoils that were too heavy for teams of oxen. Stronger andfaster than oxen, horses increased productivity by reduc-ing the time needed for plowing, but they cost more tofeed and equip. Thus, while agricultural surpluses didgrow and better plowing did play a role in this growth,areas that continued to use oxen and even old-styleplows seem to have shared in the general populationgrowth of the period.

    Independent cities governedand defended by communesappeared first in Italy andFlanders and then elsewhere.

    Communes were groups of leading citizens who bandedtogether to defend their cities and demand the privi-lege of self-government from their lay or ecclesiasticallord. Lords who granted such privileges benefited fromthe commune’s economic dynamism. Lacking extensivefarmlands, these cities turned to manufacturing andtrade, which they encouraged through the laws they en-acted. Laws making serfs free once they came into thecity, for example, attracted many workers from the coun-tryside. Cities in Italy that had shrunk within walls builtby the Romans now pressed against those walls, forcingthe construction of new ones. Pisa built a new wall in1000 and expanded it in 1156. Other twelfth-centurycities that built new walls include Florence, Brescia˚,Pavia, and Siena˚.

    Settlers on a group of islands at the northern endof the Adriatic Sea that had been largely uninhabited inRoman times organized themselves into the city ofVenice. In the eleventh century it became the dominantsea power in the Adriatic. Venice competed with Pisa andGenoa, its rivals on the western side of Italy, for leader-ship in the trade with Muslim ports in North Africa andthe eastern Mediterranean. A somewhat later merchant’s

    Cities and theRebirth of Trade

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  • list mentions trade in some three thousand “spices” (in-cluding dyestuffs, textile fibers, and raw materials), someof them products of Muslim lands and some coming viathe Silk Road or the Indian Ocean trading system (seeChapter 7). Among them were eleven types of alum (fordyeing), eleven types of wax, eight types of cotton, fourtypes of indigo, five types of ginger, four types of paper,and fifteen types of sugar, along with cloves, caraway,tamarind, and fresh oranges. By the time of the Cru-sades (see below), maritime commerce throughout theMediterranean had come to depend heavily on shipsfrom Genoa, Venice, and Pisa.

    Ghent, Bruges˚, and Ypres˚ in Flanders rivaled theItalian cities in prosperity, trade, and industry. Enjoyingcomparable independence based on privileges grantedby the counts of Flanders, these cities centralized thefishing and wool trades of the North Sea region. Around1200 raw wool from England began to be woven intowoolen cloth for a very large market.

    More abundant coinage also signaled the upturn ineconomic activity. In the ninth and tenth centuries mostgold coins had come from Muslim lands and the Byzan-tine Empire. Being worth too much for most tradingpurposes, they seldom reached Germany, France, andEngland. The widely imitated Carolingian silver pennysufficed. With the economic revival of the twelfth cen-tury, minting of silver coins began in Scandinavia,

    Poland, and other outlying regions. In the following cen-tury the reinvigoration of Mediterranean trade madepossible a new and abundant gold coinage.

    THE CRUSADES, 1095–1204

    Western European revival coincided with and con-tributed to the Crusades, a series of religiouslyinspired Christian military campaigns against Muslimsin the eastern Mediterranean that dominated the pol-itics of Europe from 1095 to 1204 (see Chapter 8 and Map9.3). Four great expeditions, the last redirected againstthe Byzantines and resulting in the Latin capture ofConstantinople, constituted the region’s largest militaryundertakings since the fall of Rome. The cultural impactof the Crusades upon western Europe resulted in noblecourts and burgeoning cities consuming more goodsfrom the east. This set the stage for the later adoptionof ideas, artistic styles, and industrial processes fromByzantium and the lands of Islam.

    Several social and economiccurrents of the eleventh cen-tury contributed to the Cru-sades. First, reforming leaders

    of the Latin Church, seeking to soften the warlike tone ofsociety, popularized the Truce of God. This movement

    The Roots ofthe Crusades

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  • limited fighting between Christian lords by specifyingtimes of truce, such as during Lent (the forty days beforeEaster) and on Sundays. Many knights welcomed a reli-giously approved alternative to fighting other Christians.Second, ambitious rulers, like the Norman chieftainswho invaded England and Sicily, were looking for newlands to conquer. Nobles, particularly younger sons inareas where the oldest son inherited everything, werehungry for land and titles to maintain their status. Third,Italian merchants wanted to increase trade in the east-ern Mediterranean and acquire trading posts in Muslimterritory. However, without the rivalry between popesand kings already discussed, and without the desire ofthe church to demonstrate political authority overwestern Christendom, the Crusades might never haveoccurred.

    Several factors focused attention on the Holy Land,which had been under Muslim rule for four centuries.Pilgrimages played an important role in European reli-gious life. In western Europe, pilgrims traveled underroyal protection, a few actually being tramps, thieves,beggars, peddlers, and merchants for whom pilgrimagewas a safe way of traveling. Genuinely pious pilgrimsoften journeyed to visit the old churches and sacredrelics preserved in Rome or Constantinople. The mostintrepid went to Jerusalem, Antioch, and other citiesunder Muslim control to fulfill a vow or to atone for a sin.

    Knights who followed a popular pilgrimage routeacross northern Spain to pray at the shrine of Santi-ago de Compostela learned of the expanding efforts ofChristian kings to dislodge the Muslims. The Umayyad

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  • Caliphate in al-Andalus had broken up in the eleventhcentury, leaving its smaller successor states prey to Chris-tian attacks from the north (see Chapter 8). This was thebeginning of a movement of reconquest that culminatedin 1492 with the surrender of the last Muslim kingdom.The word crusade, taken from Latin crux for “cross,” wasfirst used in Spain. Stories also circulated of the war con-ducted by seafaring Normans against the Muslims inSicily, whom they finally defeated in the 1090s afterthirty years of fighting.

    The tales of pilgrims returning from Palestine fur-ther induced both churchmen and nobles to considerthe Muslims a proper target for Christian militancy. Mus-lim rulers, who had controlled Jerusalem, Antioch, andAlexandria since the seventh century, generally toleratedand protected Christian pilgrims. But after 1071, whena Seljuk army defeated the Byzantine emperor at theBattle of Manzikert (see Chapter 8), Turkish nomadsspread throughout the region, and security along the pil-grimage route through Anatolia, already none too good,deteriorated further. The decline of Byzantine powerthreatened ancient centers of Christianity, such as Eph-esus in Anatolia, previously under imperial control.

    Despite the theological differences between the Or-thodox and Roman churches, the Byzantine emperorAlexius Comnenus asked the pope and western Euro-pean rulers to help him confront the Muslim threatand reconquer what the Christians termed the HolyLand, the early centers of Christianity in Palestine andSyria. Pope Urban II responded at the Council of Cler-mont in 1095. He addressed a huge crowd of peoplegathered in a field and called on them, as Christians, tostop fighting one another and go to the Holy Land tofight Muslims.

    “God wills it!” exclaimed voices in the crowd. Peoplecut cloth into crosses and sewed them on their shirts tosymbolize their willingness to march on Jerusalem. Thusbegan the holy war now known as the “First Crusade.”People at the time more often used the word peregrina-tio, “pilgrimage.” Urban promised to free crusaders whohad committed sins from their normal penance, or actsof atonement, the usual reward for peaceful pilgrims toJerusalem.

    The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099 andestablished four crusader principalities, the most impor-tant being the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The next twoexpeditions strove with diminishing success to protectthese gains. Muslim forces retook Jerusalem in 1187. Bythe time of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the original reli-gious ardor had so diminished that the commandersagreed, at the urging of the Venetians, to sack Constan-tinople first to help pay the cost of transporting the armyby ship.

    Exposure to Muslim culturein Spain, Sicily, and the cru-sader principalities establishedin the Holy Land made many

    Europeans aware of things lacking in their own lives.Borrowings from Muslim society occurred gradually andare not always easy to date, but Europeans eventuallylearned how to manufacture pasta, paper, refined sugar,colored glass, and many other items that had formerlybeen imported. Arabic translations of and commen-taries on Greek philosophical and scientific works, and

    The Impact ofthe Crusades

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  • equally important original works by Arabs and Iranians,provided a vital stimulus to European thought.

    Some works were brought directly into the Latinworld through the conquests of Sicily, parts of Spain andthe Holy Land, and Constantinople (for Greek texts).Others were rendered into Latin by translators whoworked in parts of Spain that continued under Muslimrule. Generations passed before all these works werestudied and understood, but they eventually trans-formed the intellectual world of the western Europeans,who previously had had little familiarity with Greekwritings. The works of Aristotle and the Muslim com-mentaries on them were of particular importance to the-ologians, but Muslim writers like Avicenna (980–1037)were of parallel importance in medicine.

    Changes affecting the lifestyle of the nobles tookplace more quickly. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122?–1204),one of the most influential women of the crusading era,accompanied her husband, King Louis VII of France, onthe Second Crusade (1147–1149). The court life of heruncle Raymond, ruler of the crusader principality of An-tioch, particularly appealed to her. After her return toFrance, a lack of male offspring led to an annulment ofher marriage with Louis, and she married Henry ofAnjou in 1151. He inherited the throne of England asHenry II three years later. Eleanor’s sons Richard Lion-Heart, famed in romance as the chivalrous foe of Saladinduring the Third Crusade (1189–1192), and John rebelledagainst their father but eventually succeeded him askings of England.

    In Aquitaine, a powerful duchy in southern France,Eleanor maintained her own court for a time. The poet-singers called troubadours who enjoyed her favor madeher court a center for new music based on the idea of“courtly love,” an idealization of feminine beauty andgrace that influenced later European ideas of romance.Thousands of troubadour melodies survive in manu-scripts, and some show the influence of the poetrystyles then current in Muslim Spain. The favorite trouba-dour instrument, moreover, was the lute, a guitar-likeinstrument with a bulging shape whose design andname (Arabic al-ud ) come from Muslim Spain. In cen-turies to come the lute would become the mainstay ofRenaissance music in Italy.

    CONCLUSION

    The legacy of Roman rule affected eastern and west-ern Europe in different ways. Byzantium inheritedthe grandeur, pomp, and legal supremacy of the impe-rial office and merged it with leadership of the Chris-

    tian church. Byzantium guarded its shrinking frontiersagainst foreign invasion but gradually contracted aroundConstantinople, its imperial capital, as more and moreterritory was lost. By contrast, no Roman core survivedin the west. The Germanic peoples overwhelmed thelegions guarding the frontiers and established king-doms based on their own traditions. The law of the kingand the law of the church did not echo each other. Yetmemories of Roman grandeur and territorial unity re-surfaced with the idea of a Holy Roman Empire, howeverunworkable that empire proved to be.

    The competition between the Orthodox and Catholicforms of Christianity complicated the role of religion inthe emergence of medieval European society and cul-ture. The Byzantine Empire, constructed on a Roman po-litical and legal heritage that had largely passed awayin the west, was generally more prosperous than theGermanic kingdoms of western Europe, and its arts andculture were initially more sophisticated. Furthermore,Byzantine society became deeply Christian well before acomparable degree of Christianization had been reachedin western Europe. Yet despite their success in transmit-ting their version of Christianity and imperial rule toKievan Russia, and in the process erecting a barrier be-tween the Orthodox Russians and the Catholic Slavs totheir west, the Byzantines failed to demonstrate the dy-namism and ferment that characterized both the Euro-peans to their west and the Muslims to their south.Byzantine armies played only a supporting role in theCrusades, and the emperors lost their capital and theirpower, at least temporarily, to western crusaders in 1204.

    Technology and commerce deepened the politicaland religious gulf between the two Christian zones.Changes in military techniques in western Europe in-creased battlefield effectiveness, while new agriculturaltechnologies led to population increases that revitalizedurban life and contributed to the crusading movementby making the nobility hunger for new lands. At the sametime, the need to import food for growing urban popula-tions contributed to the growth of maritime commercein the Mediterranean and North Seas. Culture and man-ufacturing benefited greatly from the increased pace ofcommunication and exchange. Lacking parallel devel-opments of a similar scale, the Byzantine Empire steadilylost the dynamism of its early centuries and by the end ofthe period had clearly fallen behind western Europe inprosperity and cultural innovation.

    ■ Key TermsCharlemagne

    medieval

    Byzantine Empire

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  • Kievan Russia

    schism

    manor

    serf

    fief

    vassal

    papacy

    Holy Roman Empire

    investiture controversy

    monasticism

    horse collar

    Crusades

    pilgrimage

    ■ Suggested ReadingStandard Byzantine histories include Dimitri Obolensky, TheByzantine Commonwealth (1971), and Warren Treadgold, AHistory of Byzantine State and Society (1997). Cyril Mango’sByzantium: The Empire of New Rome (1980) emphasizes cul-tural matters. For later Byzantine history see A. P. Kazhdan andAnn Wharton Epstein in Change in Byzantine Culture in theEleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1985), which stresses social andeconomic issues, and D. M. Nicol, Byzantium and Venice (1988).

    Roger Collins’s Early Medieval Europe, 300–1000 (1991) surveysinstitutional and political developments, while Robert MerrillBartlett, The Making of Europe (1994), emphasizes frontiers.For the later part of the period see Susan Reynolds, Kingdomsand Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 2d ed. (1997).Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, 400–1500 (1989), stressesquestions of social structure. Among many books on religiousmatters see Richard W. Southern, Western Society and theChurch in the Middle Ages (1970), and Richard Fletcher, TheBarbarian Conversion (1997). Susan Reynolds makes the casefor avoiding the term feudalism in Fiefs and Vassals (1994).

    More specialized economic and technological studies beginwith the classic Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and SocialChange (1962). See also Michael McCormick, Origins of theEuropean Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900 (2002); C. M. Cipolla, Money, Prices and Civilization in theMediterranean World, Fifth to Seventeenth Century (1956); andGeorges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the MedievalWest (1990), which includes translated documents. J. C. Russell,The Control of Late Ancient and Medieval Population (1985),analyzes demographic history and the problems of data.

    On France see the numerous works of Rosamond McKitterick,including The Frankish Kingdoms Under the Carolingians, 751–987 (1983). On England see Peter Hunter Blair, An Introductionto Anglo-Saxon England (1977), and Christopher Brooke, TheSaxon and Norman Kings, 3d ed. (2001). On Italy see ChrisWickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society,400–1000 (1981), and Edward Burman, Emperor to Emperor:

    Italy Before the Renaissance (1991). On Germany and the HolyRoman Empire see Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Mid-dle Ages, c. 800–1056 (1991). On Spain see J. F. O’Callaghan, AHistory of Medieval Spain (1975), and R. Collins, Early MedievalSpain: Unity and Diversity 400–1000 (1983). On Viking Scan-dinavia see John Haywood’s illustrated Encyclopaedia of theViking Age (2000).

    Amy Keller’s popularly written Eleanor of Aquitaine and theFour Kings (1950) tells the story of an extraordinary woman.Dhuoda, Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Coun-sel for Her Son, trans. Carol Neel (1991), offers a firsthand lookat a Carolingian noblewoman. More general works includeMargaret Wade’s A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Me-dieval Life (1986) and Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser’sA History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to thePresent (1989). In the area of religion, Caroline Bynum’s Jesusas Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages(1982) illustrates new views about women.

    On Kievan Russia see Janet Martin, Medieval Russia, 980–1584(1995); Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergenceof Rus: 750–1200 (1996); and Thomas S. Noonan, The IslamicWorld, Russia and the Vikings, 750–900: The Numismatic Evi-dence (1998).

    Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (1987), is astandard work. He has also a more colorful version in The Ox-ford Illustrated History of the Crusades (1995). For other viewssee Jonathan Phillips, The Crusades, 1095–1197 (2002), andNorman Housley, Crusading and Warfare in Medieval and Ren-aissance Europe (2001). For a masterful account with a Byzan-tine viewpoint, see Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades,3 vols. (1987). For accounts from the Muslim side see CaroleHillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999).

    Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival ofTrade (1952), and Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolutionof the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (1971), masterfu