Map 1: Europe
Chronology of Islam
| c. 570 | birth of Mohammed |
| 611–14 | Persian invasion of Syria and Palestine |
| 618 | Persian invasion of Egypt |
| 622 | The Hejira: Mohammed flees Mecca for Medina |
| 622–28 | war between Byzantine and Persian Empires |
| 630 | Mohammed re-enters Mecca in triumph |
| 632 | death of Mohammed |
| by 634 | conquests of Arabia, Palestine and Syria |
| 637 | conquest of Ctesiphon, capital of the Persian Empire |
| 638 | conquest of Jerusalem and Antioch |
| 661 | Omayyad caliphate established, with Damascus as capital |
| 711–20 | conquest of Spain |
| 717 | Constantinople besieged by Muslims |
| 732 | Charles Martel defeats Muslims at Poitiers |
| 750 | Abbasid caliphate established |
| 762 | foundation of Baghdad, now capital of Empire |
| 785 | Great Mosque begun at Cordoba |
| 1085 | Christian reconquest of Toledo |
| 1492 | Castilian Conquest of Granada |
Introduction: The High Middle Ages 900-1250
Introduction
The fragmentation of unity in the Latin West in the early Middle Ages, a strong theme throughout Part One, engendered a certain despair and sense of decline. The high middle ages, however, are marked by a new optimism, discernible throughout politics, culture and religion. The optimism and fragmentation are exemplified in the great number of extant church buildings from this period, their exuberant grandeur and the remarkable diversity of their architectural forms. There was also diversity in perceptions and expectations of rulership, as subsequent chapters will show.
The first period of the Middle Ages, from the fourth century to the ninth, was a time of despair – the ʿDark Agesʾ – which witnessed the disintegration of the Mediterranean world and the collapse of its political, cultural, and economic unity. But even more important than the actual destruction was the fact that people realized that they were living in an age of decline. It was what made St Augustine and Gregory the Great think that the end of the world was at hand. It was what gave the sense of urgency to the work of Cassiodorus and Alcuin, striving to salvage the culture of the ancient world before it was too late. It was the motive-force behind the great political developments of the period.
But in the High Middle Ages (900–1250), it was no longer despair and the recognition of failure that were to the fore, but hope and the realization of success.1 The hope was often to restore the glories of the past, but it was
1 The term ʿHigh Middle Agesʾ originated in the German, das Hochmittelalter, which would perhaps have been better translated as the ʿexaltedʾ or ʿsublimeʾ Middle Ages.
none the less confident. Pessimism gave way to optimism; the change was so marked that historians have tried to explain it by reference to the sudden removal of an all-pervasive fear. They claimed that everyone had been expecting the world to come to an end with the year 1000, and that the new optimism was a result of the joie de vivre which was experienced when the millennium was safely passed. But in fact the change to optimism had occurred a generation or two before, and was more probably caused by the cessation of the Viking, Saracen, and Hungarian raids. It was visible in every aspect of life, political, economic, religious, and cultural, and particularly in an outburst of church-building which an eleventh-century monk described as follows:
One would have thought that the world was shaking itself to cast off its old age and was clothing itself everywhere in a white robe of churches. Then nearly all the churches of episcopal sees, and all the other minsters of divers saints, and even the little village oratories, were reconstructed more beautifully than before.
The author of this passage, Ralph Glaber, was apparently referring to the years 1002–3, and was therefore guilty of the wildest exaggeration; but the statement would be valid if it were applied to the whole period from 900 to 1250. During those three-and-a-half centuries the vast majority of the cathedrals and churches of the Latin West were built in their present form, at least in so far as their main fabric was concerned.2 For while the monuments that have survived from the Dark Ages (c. 400–900) consist of only a very few churches, fragments of churches, or crypts, those that have survived from the central period of the Middle Ages are innumerable. They are to be seen in almost every town and village of Western Europe, and still amaze us by their grandeur.
Even more impressive than the number of the monuments is their variety. This also is in contrast with what had gone before. Under Roman rule the general style of monumental architecture had been recognizably uniform in all the provinces of the Empire, from Britain to Africa and from Spain to Syria. In the Dark Ages something of that uniformity had been maintained, for though the architecture of the Islamic countries was beginning to follow a divergent course, the buildings of the Ostrogoths,
2 It is of course true that additions and alterations were made to most churches during the later Middle Ages, but it was only on comparatively rare occasions that the work of the High Middle Ages was entirely swept away as at Bath Abbey, Abbeville Church, Ulm Minster, and Milan Cathedral.
Visigoths, Lombards, and Franks were built as imitations (though sometimes poor imitations) of the Roman or Byzantine style. But in the period from 900 to 1250 this uniformity ceased completely; the Byzantine style was gradually confined to the Eastern Empire, the various Islamic styles became more and more distinctive, and in the Latin West there was a whole medley of different styles.
This lack of uniformity, even in the West, may at first sight seem surprising, for it is often thought that Romanesque architecture was uniform, and gave way to Gothic in all the countries of Western Europe. To rid oneself of such a misconception, it is only necessary to travel across Europe, watching one type of church-tower give place to another as one passes from province to province, or sometimes even from valley to valley. In Saxony the western towers of a church rise from a Westwerk which looks like (and in origin was) a castle designed to protect the monks from the heathen. In the Rhineland the greater churches sometimes have as many as six cylindrical towers which look like overgrown pinnacles and give the whole building the air of some monster out of Germanic legend. In the brick towers of Lombardy, each storey has more windows than the one below. In those of Rome every storey looks identical. In France there are different types of tower for almost every region. They are not merely architectural curiosities. They stand as monuments to the intense localism of the High Middle Ages, when every manʾs ʿcountryʾ (patria) was not the kingdom, duchy, or county in which he lived, but his town or village. An echo of this sentiment may still be caught by the French peasant who refers to his village as mon pays, but in the Middle Ages it was all-pervading. Even the law might change from village to village; a thirteenth-century judge pointed out that in the various counties, cities, boroughs, and townships of England he had always to ask what was the local customary law and how it was employed before he could successfully try a case. The legal uniformity of the Roman Empire had disappeared completely, and law, like the architectural style of the church-towers, varied from parish to parish.
That was why medieval civilization was so firmly rooted. It grew out of the earth, as it were. It was not until the middle of the thirteenth century that the diversities which had previously distinguished each valley or village were absorbed into a more generalized cultural pattern, and even then the civilization of Latin Christendom was by no means uniform. On the contrary, there were at least two distinct cultural traditions, one in the north and west, the other in central Europe. The first was primarily French and is typified by the great Gothic cathedrals. The finest of these – Amiens, Beauvais, Laon, Reims, Soissons, Paris, Sens, Chartres, and Bourges – were already in course of construction, if not completed, by 1250, and are commonly regarded as the most typical expression of medieval civilization. It is not always recognized, however, that in this period of the High Middle Ages, the art which they represented was confined to part of northern France and England.3 It was only in the later Middle Ages that Gothic art spread to the greater part of the Latin West. Before the middle of the thirteenth century it was still preeminently French and as novel as the newly-found strength of the French monarchy or the speculations of the philosophers at Paris University.
In Germany and Italy there was a different culture and a different political background. The Germans, indeed, might have been described (from a French point of view) as ʿbackwardʾ. They were slow in developing feudalism beyond its Carolingian stage, being in this respect at least a century
3 Gothic art was in many ways the badge of the French monarchy, but it was also popular in a slightly modified form in England, Normandy, and Anjou.
behind France and England, and they retained till the middle of the thirteenth century the political ideal of reviving the Roman Empire in the West. Consequently, it was not surprising that, as would-be Romans, they long adhered to the Romanesque style of architecture in preference to Gothic. It was only after the death of Frederick II and the collapse of the medieval Empire (1250) that they laid themselves open to French influences in both politics and culture, and turned from Romanesque to Gothic architecture.
In Italy, however, the Roman tradition was so strong that it was never completely overcome. Even in churches where the pointed arch was used, there was, except on very rare occasions, little or nothing of the true Gothic spirit. An occasional church, like Milan Cathedral, might be genuinely northern in spirit, but normally there was a calm insistence on horizontal rather than vertical lines, on wall-space for frescoes rather than large windows, on coloured marble inlays rather than sculpture, and on correct proportions rather than overwhelming height. The tradition of the Roman basilica was never entirely forgotten. It persisted throughout the Middle Ages, and as was only to be expected, was especially strong in Rome itself. Compare, for example, the nave of the basilica of St Laurence- without-the-walls (1216–27) (Plate 10) with that of Amiens Cathedral (1220–36) (Plate 16). The one, though a church of some importance, is a simple structure, with Ionic colonnades and a wooden roof. The other, with its stone vault poised 138 ft. 9 in. above floor-level, is a miracle of engineering skill. The Roman church shows conservatism and a determination to preserve the classical tradition, while the Gothic reflects the fact that in the north men did not know how to build in the classical manner, and consequently had to experiment, hoping by sheer boldness and grandeur to atone for their lack of Romanitas.
Italy and France, indeed, were the two cultural poles of the Latin West. In the one, culture was formal, since it was based on the classical tradition which constituted, as it were, a body of rules for what was ʿdoneʾ and what was ʿnot doneʾ, so that a poem, painting, or even a way of life was considered good only if it was ʿcorrectʾ. In the other, formal rules were subordinated to the excitement of bold experiment and the spirit of inquiry; the aim was not to conform to the standards of the ancients but to surpass them. It was therefore typical that while Bologna, the foremost Italian university, specialized in Roman law, Paris specialized in philosophy and theology; and that while the Church was governed and organized from Rome, the enthusiasm which created the great monastic movements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries came from France.
The distinction between Italy and Germany on the one hand, and France and England on the other, was fundamental for the whole period from 900 to 1250. It was not merely cultural in the narrow sense of the word, but was political also. Italy and Germany were the home of the Papacy and Empire, France and England of feudal monarchies and (ultimately) of nation-states. Papacy and Empire were the two aspects of a universal society which was held to have been founded by God and which had been consecrated by the tradition of St Peter and Gregory the Great, or of Constantine and Charlemagne. It might, in the same sense as classical art, have been described as ʿcorrectʾ, since it was based on absolute principles. But in France and England the conception of this universal society, though not denied, was pushed into the background since, correct though it might be, it hindered the development of feudal monarchy. Feudal monarchy was supported, not because it was in conformity with any theoretical right- ordering of Christian society, but because it worked. Like Gothic architecture, it was a triumph not of abstract reasoning but of empirical skill.
The essential difference between the two political systems can best be seen if we turn to the beginning of the tenth century and examine the chaos out of which they arose. By then the Vikings, Hungarians, and Saracens had almost completely disrupted the political organization of Europe. Though from time to time there was an emperor he had no empire, and though there were a number of kings it was never certain what they were kings of. All political divisions were in a state of flux. There were kingdoms ʿinʾ Burgundy and Provence, and kingdoms ‘of’ the Lombards, Italians, Lotharingians, Franks (both eastern and western), and Teutons. But these were not institutions so much as titles, and even as titles they were not indispensable. In their formal documents, the kings of this period did not usually trouble to name or describe their kingdoms, but simply styled themselves by a formula such as divina dementia favente rex (by favour of divine clemency, king). What was important to them was that God and the Church had given them authority to be kings, or licence to rule if they could.
When a man was made king, he was not given a complete machinery of government, but simply power to rule. He was not instituted into an office but made a special sort of person. The old idea of a state or res publica had vanished because the political institutions of the ancient world had ceased to have any reality. The only way in which effective power could be established was by means of the bond between vassal and lord. Consequently, the king who was to be successful in ruling his kingdom, had to inspire such confidence and loyalty that his subjects chose him voluntarily as their lord. He had to build up his power by his own exertions.
There were two ways in which this might be done. The first was that of the Capetian kings of France and was exceedingly cautious. It consisted of the consolidation of the royal demesne, or kingʾs private estate – in this case a narrow belt of territory which stretched, approximately, from Paris to Orléans. The earlier Capetians devoted almost all their attention to it. It was there that they wanted obedient vassals, and there that they hoped to make their power real. With some exaggeration, it might be said that they put the interest of their demesne above that of the kingdom at large. In their view it would have been useless for a king to try to make himself obeyed by mighty subjects such as the dukes of Normandy, Aquitaine, or Burgundy, unless he could first establish in the royal demesne a power that was at least as great as theirs. Consequently they endeavoured not to dissipate their strength by undertaking futile expeditions across the length and breadth of France, but to concentrate it round Paris. It was important, in the Capetian view, that before a king tried to rule he should be strong enough to enforce obedience to his command.
The disadvantage of this policy was that, though it was eventually successful, it was painfully slow and ran counter to the accepted conception of kingship. Rex a regendo, said the learned: kings were kings because they ruled, and if they abandoned the attempt, they were not worthy of the name. It was not surprising therefore, that monarchs who were influenced by the classical tradition, rejected the Capetian policy as unworthy, and adopted instead, as in Italy and Germany, the policy of the ʿlarge viewʾ. According to this, the interests of the whole kingdom, perhaps even of Latin Christendom itself, were to be put above all considerations of mere expediency. The king or emperor was to govern in Godʾs name, establish peace and justice, and protect the Church. If he found difficulties in his way, he was not to wash his hands of them, but to overcome them. If his subjects defied him, he had to march against them and establish his authority by force, or perish in the attempt.
It was a heroic policy, and one that called forth some of the best qualities in a ruler. For close on three-and-a-half centuries, a series of German kings and emperors attempted to fulfil it, and, though they eventually failed, the story of their attempt to build the society which they considered to be right is still worthy of consideration.