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Glossary
A
Abbey
monastery, or closed community of nuns or monks, led by an abbot (which means ‘father’) or abbess (‘mother’). Monks and nuns took vows on a rule, originally that of Benedict of Norcia prescribing (personal) poverty, chastity and obedience, and they led a life of contemplation and prayer for the salvation of souls. Later on, several other rules have been applied.
Al-Andalus
Arab name for the part of the Iberian peninsula that was under Muslim rule. Now, the general term for southern Spain.
Artes liberales
‘liberal’ (free) arts taught at schools for higher education which took their name from the fact that their practice was free from manual labour, in contrast to ‘mechanical’ arts, which included medicine and architecture. Traditionally the seven liberal arts were divided into the trivium, the linguistic arts connected with the spoken and written word, and the quadrivium, the collective name for the four mathematical disciplines.
B
Bailiffs, baillis
officials appointed in Flanders c.1170, salaried and dismissible at will. Their main tasks were to maintain the count’s prerogatives, to collect revenues on his behalf and to organise the administration of justice within a jurisdiction. Similar officials were soon afterwards appointed in France.
Banal lordship, seigneurie
local lordship based not primarily on the possession of land and of peasants living on that land, but on the local appropriation and exercise of bannus and other regal rights by local strongmen who were not accountable to either kings or counts.
Banlieu
a town’s jurisdiction extending a few miles surrounding the walls.
Bannus, bannum
in the Carolingian Empire, royal prerogative to coerce and to command each and everybody (actually, the early medieval equivalent of sovereign power), which was delegated at regional level to counts, and at local level to the counts’ representatives (vice-counts, etc.). Later, ‘banal’ rights formed the basis of banal lordships.
Benefice
a source of income, mostly land along with its workers, given as a conditional tenure (as a fief) in exchange for services rendered to the lord.
Bishop, bishopric
(from the Greek epi-scopos, overseer) the head of the Christian community within a territory, originally around a Roman civitas or city. Responsible for the appointment of priests and the conduct of the community. In the early Middle Ages bishops were usually involved in local government and jurisdiction.
Bull
papal ordinance, authenticated by a leaden seal (Latin bulla).
C
Caesaropapism
a form of rule in which the secular head of state (‘caesar’) is also the religious leader (‘pope’).
Canon law
laws of the Church, codified systematically in the twelfth century. Resolutions taken by councils are also called canons.
Canon, canoness
canons were originally clerics who followed the rules of the Church and formed a religious association called ‘chapter’, headed by a provost and a dean. Since the tenth century, a distinction was made between secular canons attached to important churches, in particular cathedrals and living individually, and regular canons, living in monasteries under a rule, usually that of St Augustine. The reform movement of the eleventh-twelfth centuries strongly encouraged canons to live in communities under a strict rule. There were also female canons or canonesses who could not of course be priests and always lived in monasteries.
Canonisation
official proclamation of sainthood of a person having lived as an exemplary Christian; the formal procedure was established only in the thirteenth century.
Cardinal
senior title in the Catholic Church, awarded to the principal clergy within the city of Rome and its vicinity, where cardinals hold the seven bishoprics. Cardinals occupy the main offices at the Curia, and since 1059 cardinals have elected the pope.
Castellanus
local official holding a castle for a superior lord (king, count, banal lord).
Catholic
originally this Greek word signified ‘universal [Christian]’; since the Schism of 1054, Latin Christians became labelled as ‘the’ Catholics.
Chancellor
the head of a ruler’s administration, originally responsible for the emission of public acts. Increasingly the chief councillor or prime minister.
Chapter
the formal association of secular canons.
Charter
in general, a formal document released by a public authority; more specifically, a charter of liberties listed the rights of a local or territorial community.
Chiefdom
small-scale polity headed by a warlord and his personal retinue of armed followers (also called Gefolgschaft in German).
Chivalry
cultural and moral encasement of knighthood, cultivating a code of values and behaviour, such as courage, loyalty, fellowship, charity and generosity.
Common law
the whole of royal laws applicable to all free subjects throughout England through the royal courts.
Commune
sworn community of citizens, mentioned in northern Italy from the late eleventh century, claiming self-government and particular privileges.
Communion
the culmination of the holy mass, the consecration of bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ, is believed to make Christ present. The host (consecrated wafer) is offered to the believers; cf. excommunication.
Complexio
specific mixture of bodily fluids which, according to medieval medicine, determined a person’s temperament and health condition.
Convent
house or community of friars or nuns belonging to one of the mendicant orders, headed by a prior or prioress.
Conversi
lay brothers primarily drawn from popular classes, employed as manual labourers in the monastic orders of Cistercians and Premonstratensians.
Copyhold
written contract whereby English landlords gave out parts of their demesne to their bondsmen for the possession of their holdings in a form of hereditary lease.
Council
or synod; in the Christian Church: assembly of bishops with decisive authority about dogmatic issues. In the early Middle Ages, councils were held at the ecumenical level (all of Christendom) as well as at the regional level, and at that time they were mostly summoned and presided over by lay rulers; the church reform of the eleventh and twelfth centuries strove at excluding laymen’s interventions. The pope of an archbishop then convened councils and synods.
Count, county,
Latin comes, comitatus in the late Roman period, a military commander and his soldiers; in the early Middle Ages, regional representative of the king and his territory.
Curia
court of a prince, or more likely that of the pope. Any court was a centre of decision-making, administration and jurisdiction.
D
Danegeld
land tax to be paid in silver coin as tribute to Danish invaders from 991, which was maintained – as a general land tax – in England until 1162.
Danelaw
the area of England north-east of the old Roman road from London to Chester, where numerous Danish farmers settled from the late ninth century onwards. Danish law and institutions survived for centuries even after English reconquest.
Demesne, domain
1) landed estate, parts of which – also called 2) ‘demesne’ or ‘reserve’ – were reserved for direct exploitation by the landlord using the labour services of his dependent tenants living on small farms providing for their subsistence (mansus). 3) As in ‘royal domain’: that part of a kingdom over which the king himself directly exercised full royal (public) authority.
Denarius
penny, silver coin first struck at the end of the seventh century, worth one-twelfth of a solidus, the standard Roman gold coin.
Diet
Reichstag, assembly of territorial princes in the (German) Empire, along with the German king or emperor. From 1470 onwards, cities were also represented.
Disputatio
oral debate as a didactic art in the teaching of rhetoric, initiated just before 1000.
Doom
customary law in Anglo-Saxon England.
Duke, dukedom, duchy
in the barbarian kingdoms dukes were governors with military powers over large territories that were supposed to be inhabited by distinct peoples; later they were the highest-ranking princes in the Empire or kingdom.
E
Emperor
the east Roman emperors in Constantinople saw themselves as the only true successors to the Roman emperors. They considered Charlemagne’s imperial coronation and that of his Carolingian successors as usurpation. Otto II created the tradition of the coronation by the pope of the elected German king as ‘Roman emperor’.
Enfeoffment
the act of conferring a fief on a vassal.
Estates
term derived from Latin status (state, condition) and French état; in English, apart from referring to large landownership, it means representative assemblies on the scale of principalities and kingdoms, also called parliaments. In the latter meaning, the plural refers to the composition of several social classes, mostly clergy, nobility, citizens and in some territories also rural communities.
Ethnogenesis
the process by which highly dynamic multi-ethnic confederations over the course of time grew into peoples with a new identity, which was grafted on to the culture of the dominant, often name-giving, group.
Eucharist
collective commemoration (in holy mass) by a Church community of the Last Supper that Christ shared with his apostles.
Exchequer
financial department of the kings of England since the twelfth century, composed of the treasury and an accounting office. Sheriffs had to submit their accounts for control on a chequered tablecloth, hence exchequer.
Excommunication
ecclesiastical censure barring a person from receiving the communion (Eucharist), which meant exclusion from the Christian community until repentance.
Exemption
the whole or partial release of an ecclesiastical person, corporation or institution from the authority of the ecclesiastical superior next highest in rank. In particular: direct subordination of a religious institution (e.g. an abbey) to the authority of the pope.
F
Feudal mode of production
(neo)Marxist shibboleth to define medieval society as a social order in which a substantial share of agrarian surpluses is transferred from peasants to aristocratic lords under non-economic (i.e. non-market) pressure.
Feudal society
medieval society could qualify as a feudal society when feudal-vassalic relations were extended, and applied more systematically, to such crucial elements of society as public governance (mediatisation), public defence (feudal levies/armies) and the aristocratic land market. This was the case for large parts of western Europe from the twelfth century onwards.
Feudal-vassalic relation
contractual, asymmetric relationship between a higher- and a lower-placed person, both free men, called lord and vassal, respectively, aimed at exchanging political and military support for protection and maintenance, ensured by the grant of a fief.
Fief
see benefice.
Fondaco
, funduq trading post in Islamic cities where blocks of houses were designated to foreign traders to store their goods and so they could live according to their own customs, with their own churches, bath-houses, ovens, administrative and court buildings; imitated by Venice for German traders.
G
Gefolgschaft
the armed followers or military retinue of a barbarian warlord.
God’s peace, God’s truce
peace agreement designed by bishops, abbots, but also secular lords from the late tenth century to protect vulnerable people (peasants, women, travellers, etc.) against excessive violence perpetrated by aristocrats; the restrictions were agreed within a defined territory and for particular days and periods, the sanction was religious.
Grundherrschaft
type of aristocratic lordship in which a large landowner exercises (to a certain degree) what we would call public authority over the peasants who lived on his estate.
Guild
association of a professional group; merchant guilds organised the trade in their home town, and the regulation and protection of the members’ trade in foreign countries. Craft guilds were compulsory local organizations regulating a particular craft.
H
Hagiography
the description of the life of exemplary Christians, often written to support the claim to their sainthood by the demonstration of miracles.
Hanse
originally a regional association of merchants to secure their regular trade routes and mediate or adjudicate conflicts. The German Hanse grew in the thirteenth century as a conglomerate of regional associations, and transformed itself in 1358 into a loosely structured league of nearly two hundred towns.
Hausmacht
the resources of a German king in the territories (duchy, county, margraviate, etc.) under the direct rule of his dynasty.
Hierocracy
conception of religious leaders (e.g. popes in Christendom) who claim a superior authority over secular heads of state.
Holy, holiness, sainthood
many religions consider some people, objects, periods of time, spaces and institutions as distinct from and superior to the profane world. In Catholicism, the Church is thought to be holy, and so was the Roman Empire since the twelfth century. In the early Middle Ages, saints were proclaimed spontaneously by a community of admiring believers. From the late tenth century onwards, the Church prescribed strict procedures sor beatification and canonisation. A saint had to have had an exemplary life in which (s)he performed miracles. A saint was entitled to mediate to God. Numerous biographies have been written to support proposals for canonisation, see hagiography..
Holy Roman Empire
the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor in 800 was presented as the ‘transfer’ of the ancient Roman Empire. The qualification of the Empire as ‘Holy’ first appeared in an imperial charter of 1157, with the intention of stressing the Empire’s equality with the Church; the title Sacrum Imperium Romanum was first used in 1254, during the Interregnum – the period in German medieval history when there was not a generally recognised German king – and remained until 1806.
Homagium
homage or commendatio, i.e. becoming a lord’s man, symbolised by the ritual of joining hands with the lord. Homage became a standard part of the ceremony in which someone became a vassal.
Humanism
in general the intellectual effort to trace, copy and study (narrative) texts from classical (Greek and Roman) Antiquity – which by itself generates a larger interest in secular culture and human action (hence: humanism). In particular: the flourishing of this effort in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, first in Italy, then also north of the Alps. Hundred subdivision of a county or (in England) shire; in England since the early tenth century: local district of originally one hundred homesteads, administered by a royal reeve who summoned the hundred’s law court.
I
Immunity
freedom of Church institutions from administrative or judicial interference by secular authorities.
Inquisition
literally ‘inquiry’, in particular about someone’s religious orthodoxy. From the early thirteenth century on, popes started to use ‘inquiries’ systematically in their attempt to eradicate groups of supposed heretics in southern France, northern Italy and the mid-Rhineland. Inquisitors often belonged to the Dominican Order. Suspects and witnesses were interrogated, if need be under torture; sanctions could be imprisonment and, more rarely, burning at the stake. In 1478, the ‘Catholic kings’ of Castile and Aragon created their own Inquisition to detect conversos or ‘crypto-Jews’.
Interdict
papal ban or ‘interdict[ion]’ on the administration of holy sacraments in a particular territory, sometimes an entire kingdom or principality.
Interregnum
the period of vacancy between two kings; in particular in the Holy Roman Empire 1254-1272.
Investiture
the conferment of the symbols of spiritual power to bishops and abbots; the fact that investiture was done by secular rulers who chose incumbents gave rise to a serious conflict (the Investiture Controversy), especially between the pope and the emperor, because bishops were closely involved in the Empire’s secular administration (Reichskirche).
J
N/A
K
Knight, knighthood
the social order of heavily armoured elite warriors on horseback, formed from the tenth century onwards by men of various social origins. In the long run, the knighthood in many parts of Europe became difficult to distinguish from the nobility.
Konigsnähe
German, proximity to the king.
L
Landfriede
German, in analogy with the God’s peace, princes and kings in the Empire tended to make voluntarily agreed arrangements between prominent parties to foster peaceful relations within their territory and to sanction breakers of the peace.
Liege
the preferred lord of a vassal.
Ligesse
French, preferential fealty of a vassal to one particular lord, the liege.
M
Maior domus
head of a ruler’s household.
Mamluk
or ghulam (literally ‘slave’ or ‘page’), the recruitment system, introduced by Abbasid caliphs in the ninth century, to use mounted slave soldiers of non-Arabic, in particular Turkic, origin as elite household troops. Shortly after 1250, the commanders of mamluk troops seized power in Egypt and erected a sultanate that would also cover Syria and Palestine. In 1517 it was incorporated in the Ottoman Empire.
Manorial system
the system of exploitation of large estates (called villae or curtes in the Latin documents of the early and central Middle Ages on the continent, and manors in England after 1066) based on unfree labour services and deliverables in kind to the landlord.
March, Mark
border region of the Carolingian Empire with a strong military administration, ruled by a margrave.
Mediatisation
devolution of government whereby a king or comparable prince leaves the effective exercise of public authority on the regional and/or local level to vassals.
Miles
Latin, knight, mounted warrior on horseback.
Ministerial knight
of unfree status or origin (in the German Empire).
Missi dominici
emissary counts and bishops sent in pairs as inspectors in the Carolingian Empire.
Monophysitism
the Christian dogma that the union of the divine and the human in the historical incarnation, Jesus Christ, as the incarnation of the Word of God, had only a single ‘nature’ which was either divine or a synthesis of divine and human.
Mozarab
Christians in al-Andalus who adapted their way of life, their language and manner of dress, but not their religion, to the dominant Arabic culture.
N
Natural philosophy
medieval equivalent of modern (natural) science – especially physics, cosmology and biology – which was mainly based on the works of Aristotle.
O
Orthodox, orthodoxy
Greek for ‘the right belief’, as convened in a council and formulated in its canons. Since the Schism of 1054, applied to eastern Christianity.
Ostkolonisation, eastward colonisation
longterm and massive migration movement of west European settlers into central Europe.
P
Pair, peer
literally in French: ‘equal’ (to the king). In late medieval France, six bishops and six dukes formed the twelve pairs; in England, the dukes, earls, viscounts and barons are seen as peers.
Parlement
French supreme court, developed from 1261 as the judicial section of the royal court, formally organised in 1345. In England, parliament in the early thirteenth century also referred to extended assemblies assisting the king in the exercise of justice; later, taxation and petitions were also dealt with. The social basis of the representation was gradually broadened to the shires and boroughs, and meetings became more regular; a ‘model parliament’ was summoned in 1295.
Patrician, patriciate
term applied by modern historians to the social elite in medieval towns, defined by more or less formal contemporary criteria such as membership of the merchants’ guild or ownership of land in the city centre.
Popolo
political organisation of affluent middle classes in Italian city-states.
Purgatory
the state of purification of the soul during the time interval between death and the Final Judgement; in the Middle Ages often conceived as a period of temporary punishment for minor sins. The duration of the stay in the Purgatory was thought to be proportional to the virtues and devotion of the deceased as well as to prayers for his/her soul. A full-blown doctrine of Purgatory was established in the Council of Lyon in 1245.
Q
Quaestio
Latin, literally ‘question’: a fixed teaching method in higher education from the twelfth century on. The pros and cons of possible answers to often complicated questions are weighed up systematically using the technique of logical analysis, before a balanced conclusion is drawn.
R
Reconquest, Reconquista
piecemeal occupation by Christian warriors, from the late tenth century to 1492, of those parts of the Iberian peninsula that had been in Muslim hands since 711.
Regalia
Latin, the rights immanently belonging to the king.
Reichskirche, imperial Church
the policy of German emperors – systematic after the beginning of the eleventh century – to confer the secular office of count or duke on (arch-) bishops, thereby integrating the highest clergy closely in secular policies and making their selection dependent on the emperor.
Renaissance
literally ‘rebirth’, referring to the restoration of classical forms and ideals as these were evoked in imitations of classical literature or of (supposedly) classical models in buildings, paintings and sculptures. Modern medieval historians distinguish renaissances in the Carolingian period, in the twelfth, and in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.
Réserve
see demesne.
S
Sacrament
ceremonial and performative acts, instituted by the Church and to be administered by priests, by which divine grace is dispensed to the worthy believers. The Church gradually formalised seven sacraments, the most relevant being baptism, confession and the Eucharist.
Saint, sainthood
see holy, holiness.
Scholasticism
shorthand for the teaching in schools for higher education and universities from the twelfth century onwards. Scholasticism was characterised by its optimism about the power of human reason, especially in seeing into theological mysteries.
Seigneur, seigneurial, seignory
see banal lordship.
Sénéchal, pl. sénéchaux
royal official in southern France, responsible for maintaining the king’s prerogatives, to collect revenues on his behalf and to organise the administration of justice (cf. bailli).
Serf, serfdom
a shorthand for all sorts of legally unfree peasants. The typical serf lived on a small farm on the estate of a large landowner; he owed labour service and other deliverables, and was subjected to his landlord’s jurisdiction (cf. Grundherrschaft).
Sheriff
administrative and judicial official of the English king in a shire.
Shire
administrative unit of land in Anglo-Saxon England, from the Norman Conquest equivalent to county, common on the continent.
Signoria, pl. signorie
tyrannical regimes constituted since the middle of the thirteenth century in Italian cities by local noblemen or mercenary captains in the service of cities.
Simony
the practice of the buying and selling of clerical offices, named after Simon in Acts 8:18-24.
Sovereign
the highest power, not recognising any superior.
Suzerain
the highest feudal lord.
Syncretism
functional fusion of old and new religious representations and practices.
Synod
regional assembly of bishops (cf. [church] council).
T
Templar
member of the religious military Order of the Temple (in Jerusalem).
Tenant-in-chief
holder of a royal fief in England after 1066. Most fiefs consisted of a bigger or smaller number of manors (estates), never of public offices (as on the continent).
Tithe
share of the harvest, traditionally one-tenth, contributed to the Church for the maintenance of the local priest, local church building and the relief of the local poor.
U
Universitas
Latin for guild or corporation, including that of teachers and students in schools for higher education that were called studia generalia at the time but which modern historians describe as universities.
V
Vassalage
see feudal-vassalic relation, homagium. Villein another word for serf, especially in England.
W
Wergeld
in Germanic law codes the compensation money that had to be paid for killing or severely injuring a person in order to avoid a blood feud.
X
N/A
Y
N/A
Z
N/A