Europe in the middle ages

Front matter

COPYRIGHT DEPOSm

Pont c 'c-i

PHYSICAL MAP OF EUROPE

Preface

Any one who wishes to understand our own times cannot be indifferent to mediaeval history for there lie the foundations of the present. It has been well said of those who talk of the “dark ages” that “the darkness is on their side.”

The author is in full sympathy with the present tendency to emphasize economic and social developments and the growth of culture. Such emphasis has resulted in the elimination from our textbooks of many details of wars and politics. But this process can be carried too far. The political outline may be¬ come so slight and so uncertain that all sense of progressive development is lost. The author hopes that in this volume the outline of political events is clear and sufficiently substantial.

Since this volume was written for the undergraduate reader it has not been thought necessary to include an elaborate bib¬ liography. Lists of selected readings have been appended to the various chapters. Most reference libraries nowadays are well stocked with standard works in the field of mediaeval history, and the student will find a competent guide to further reading in his own instructor. For further assistance the student may turn to the general Guide to Historical Literature , edited by W. H. Allison and others (1931), and to the special Guide to the Study of Mediaeval History (revised ed., 1931) by L. J. Paetow.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Professor Hutton Webster for the use of several maps from his Early European History.

Boston University March, 1932 iii

Contents

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iii

CHAPTER

Chapter One Introductory: The Land And The People

Why Study History?

History is the record of human experience. It is concerned with the whole of the past of mankind. It is “all we know about everything man has ever done, or thought, or felt.” This past of mankind has become a social heritage which each generation receives, transforms, extends, and hands on to the next.

From the study of history we gain social experience. Gre¬ gariousness or the social instinct is fundamental in human nature. Men live and have always lived as members of groups, not in isolation. It is important that each of us be trained for normal and helpful life in such social groups as the family, the community, the nation, and the family of nations, which is humanity. To this end social experience in each group is essential. Such experience is best gained, of course, in actual life. But in preparation for actual life in the various social groups the individual will do well to relive the life story of each group from its primitive beginnings to the present day. This is the study of history.

Another reason for studying history is that it helps to make the world intelligible. None of the institutions which make up our present world can be understood merely as something which is; it is always in process of becoming something else. A study of the history of an institution is, then, only the study of the in¬ stitution itself. To look at an institution in the present is to see only a plane surface in two dimensions. History is the third dimension. Through it we enter an institution’s structure, wan¬ der through its rooms and discover their uses. “To really understand anything we must know the life that it has lived.”

Again, through the study of history we may hope for progress. To live only in the present is to be the prisoner of the present. “To study history is to escape out of prison because it compels us to compare the ways of our own age with other ways,” says Professor Gilbert Murray. He continues, “There has been hardly any great forward movement of humanity which did not draw its inspiration from the knowledge, or the idealization, of the past.” It is essential, therefore, not only that each suc¬ cessive generation should study history, but that each genera¬ tion should write its own textbooks. Passing in review the whole record of civilization, its social heritage, humanity should hold fast what is good. It was in this spirit that Ramsay MacDonald addressed the League of Nations Assembly. “What we have to do is to hold out our one hand to the past, and to hold out the other hand to the future, and to move steadily on, taking the past with us, and embracing the prospects, hopes and comforts which the future gives.”

Why Study European History?

It is obvious that certain portions of the record of human ex¬ perience, certain fields of history, are more immediately useful to us than are others. There are in the world to-day four great civilizations, the Chinese, the Hindu, the Greek-Oriental, and the Western. Our civilization, of course, is the Western, or European. Practically all the peoples who have counted for much in American history have been of European origin. Every square mile of territory now in our possession has come to us through seven different states, all European. We speak a Euro¬ pean language. When we learn another language it is usually a European language. We wear European clothes. Our political institutions, our law, nearly all our churches, our art, are Euro¬ pean in origin. Our very history had its beginnings as an aspect of European history. The discovery, exploration, and settle¬ ment of America were the results of European movements, and sprang from the economic needs, the religious disturbances, and the adventuresome spirit of Europe. And since its beginnings our history has been greatly influenced by, has continued to be an integral part of, the general history of western civ¬ ilization.

Even if we were not Europeans, if we were Chinese or Japa¬ nese, the study of European history would be of vital impor¬ tance for us. The world is coming to be European. It was Europeanized in several essential aspects in the nineteenth century, and the process is still going on. This spread of Euro¬ pean culture has come with the spread of the economic interests of the western nations (including our own) throughout the world. This is not to say that religious and humanitarian mo¬ tives have not played a part. In studying European history, then, we are led into the study of world history.

The Physical Geography of Europe

If history is the record of man’s experience, it is also the rec¬ ord of his experience in a particular environment. The earth on which man lives is immensely old. The estimates of geologists vary from five hundred million years to one billion five hun¬ dred million years, and the more recent estimates tend to be the longer. Four great geologic eras have been distinguished. They are the Archean, the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic. We might compare these four eras in the history of the earth with the four ages in the history of man, namely, the prehistoric, the ancient, the mediaeval, and the modern. The Archean era lasted as long, perhaps, as the three remaining eras all together. In this first era of the earth’s history molten rock was still reaching its surface in a flood. The very oldest of the sedimen¬ tary rock was laid down as weathering began its unending process. None of the continents had received their present outlines, however. Life appeared but it developed only the simplest forms, as the few fossils of this era reveal. The Paleo¬ zoic era, or the period of ancient life, covered perhaps one-third of the life of the earth. Most of North America appeared above the sea at this time, it is thought. The first mountain ranges of central Europe and Asia appeared. The worn stumps of these ancient ranges may still be seen in Ireland, Wales, France, and central Germany. Thence these ranges continued across central Asia to the Pacific, and to the southeast through

India to Australia, at that time connected with India. The fossils of this age are abundant, but the animal life was as yet of the water. In the swamp-lands grew the fern-like trees which were to become our coal.

The Mesozoic era represents about one-tenth of the whole age of the earth. It is the age of reptiles, gigantic dinosaurs, both on land and in the sea. Southern Europe and northern Africa were under water. A wide-stretching sea, the shrunken remnant of which is the Mediterranean, covered the southern half of England, the whole of France, Italy, and southeastern Europe, and, reaching northward through Siberia, joined the Arctic Ocean. On the southeast this great sea extended to the Indian Ocean. In the western hemisphere the Mesozoic era was one of mountain making, the great backbone of the two Ameri¬ can continents, from Alaska to Cape Horn, being thrust aloft. The Cenozoic or “modern” era extends to our own time and began about two or three million years ago. About the middle of the period came the last great upward thrust in Europe and Asia, which continents gradually took their present form. The Mediterranean shrank to its present size. The great highland axis or backbone of Europe and Asia appeared, stretching from Spain to China. Its highest points are the peaks of the Alps and the Himalayas, the youngest and the loftiest mountains in the world.

The continent of Europe in its present shape is like a tri¬ angle, with the Iberian peninsula as its apex and the base rest¬ ing on Asia. The axis, extending from apex to base, is consider¬ ably south of the center. It is an irregular mountain range and includes the Pyrenees, Cevennes, Jura, and Vosges, the whole Alpine chain, only two-fifths of which is in Switzerland, and the Carpathians and Balkans. This dividing ridge is then submerged in the Black and Caspian seas (left over from the ancient Medi¬ terranean Ocean), whose northern parts are much shallower than their southern. Thus Europe is divided, by this long moun¬ tain axis, into two unequal parts. The northern and much larger part is a great lowland plain, the most important single geo¬ graphical influence in Europe. It is gently sloping to the north¬ west and north, and the slope is continued under the English

Channel and the North, Baltic, and White seas, which are all very shallow and really represent encroachments of the sea upon the lowlands. The long fight of the Netherlanders against fur¬ ther encroachment is one of the epics of European history. Farther west and north the land rises again in the mountains of Wales, Scotland, and Scandinavia. This great lowland plain is drained by numerous large rivers, the Loire, Seine, Rhine, Oder, Vistula, and others. There is nowhere any good natural boundary. It is possible to travel by rail to-day from the south¬ west of France through Paris and Berlin to the extreme north¬ east of European Russia without having passed through a single tunnel or once having been more than six hundred feet above sea level. All political boundaries in this great plain have, hitherto, been made and maintained by force, as is illustrated by most European wars, including the last once. The low plain and the shallow sea are extremely favorable to life. The oldest forms of life were probably of marine origin at depths of less than six hundred feet. The greatest development of land fauna has been at heights of less than six hundred feet. It is interesting to note that three-quarters of Europe falls within these limits.

South of Europe’s highland axis the descent is short and ab¬ rupt and continues under the water. The Mediterranean Sea and the southern parts of the Black and Caspian seas are more than 6000 feet deep over large areas. In contrast with the great lowland plain of the north, the south presents little more than the three peninsulas of Spain, Italy, and the Balkans, all fairly mountainous. There are a few important rivers, the Ebro, Rhone, Po, and Danube, the latter the longest in Europe. The other rivers here are short and unimportant.

On the whole Europe has a large number of important rivers and their significance should not be missed. Rivers are high¬ ways of communication, and were so especially in a time when the land was covered with dense forests and in an age that knew not of railways. River valleys make possible the move¬ ment of peoples. Hun, Avar, Slav, and Magyar followed the Danube westward. The Franks, the Bavarians, the crusaders, and the Hapsburgs followed it eastward. Three political capi¬ tals and scores of sanctuaries dotted its banks. The Rhine valley was the funnel through which Celt and Teuton poured to the west. A project recently begun will unite the Rhine with the Danube by a canal, enabling seagoing ships to travel by in¬ land water the 2000 miles from the North Sea to the Black Sea. The Rhone valley shaped Burgundy; the Ebro river gave its name to the Iberian peninsula. On the other hand, rivers are not good boundaries. The Romans made the Rhine their fron¬ tier, Charlemagne placed his capital on its banks, and the French have sought to imitate the Romans, but they have all labored in vain.

Mountain ranges, on the other hand, are barriers to com¬ munication and promote localism and provincialism. “Balkan” is a Turkish word meaning “mountain”, and the group of small and contending states in that peninsula is a not unnatural re¬ sult of the physical background. In less degree the mountains of Italy and of Spain, of France and of Germany, and even of Wales and of Scotland, have fostered sectionalism in those countries and delayed national union.

It remains to note Europe’s relation to the rest of the world. To the north she is hemmed in by Arctic sea and ice. To the west the stormy Atlantic remained a barrier until recent centu¬ ries. To the south the Sahara is the true boundary of European culture, if not of Europe. The narrow tideless Mediterranean is a highway over which Europe’s culture has flowed to north¬ ern Africa and, occasionally, as Saracen civilization attests, Africa’s culture has crossed to Europe. Of all Europe’s barriers, the Sahara has been the slowest to yield to man’s attack.

As seen from Asia, Europe is but the peninsular end of the single great continent of Eurasia. The dividing line between Asia and her daughter continent is a very real one, however, and hard to cross. Mountain and forest stretch along most of its length. The Caspian Sea interposes its barrier of seven hundred miles at the south. But between the Ural mountains and the Caspian Sea is a gap of unforested lowland, once the smooth floor of an inland sea. The drought of s um mer and the cold north winds of winter have combined to keep this gap open. Through it have come hordes of wild and warlike men from “the dead heart of Asia” — Hun and Magyar, Finn and Turk. Their impact upon the peoples of Europe is a most important factor in Europe’s history.

Early Man in Europe

There are evidences of man’s life in Europe as early as any¬ where in the world. Traces of early man are so abundant and archaeologists have made them so familiar that it is no longer possible to retain the old division of historic and prehistoric in man’s life on the earth. The invention of writing some three or four thousand years before Christ made it much easier for us to find out through written records what men did and what men thought about, but the study of the weapons and other implements and utensils of man thousands of years before the invention of writing tells us much of what men did and some¬ thing, at least, of what they thought. It is better to divide man’s history into a “literary” period, some five or six thou¬ sand years long now, and a “ pre-literary ” period, the evidences of which stretch back at least one hundred thousand years.

During the long pre-literary period man’s weapons and im¬ plements were chiefly of stone. Through some ninety thousand years his implements were shapen but crudely. This was the Old Stone (palaeolithic) Age. Throughout this long period men “took the world as they found it, and made little attempt to alter it.” The animals they slaughtered and the fruits they gathered were wild. Their homes were caves found ready for use. Then came a period marked by a very different attitude of mind. Man began to try to improve his environment. He be¬ gan by shaping his implements, still of stone, much more ex¬ pertly. This was the New Stone (neolithic) Age. Axes, drills, chisels, and saws were skillfully shaped and highly polished with the highest art ever reached by man in stone. These greatly improved utensils became the basis for what is perhaps the first real civilization developed by man. Evidences of this civilization of the New Stone Age are to be found in nearly all parts of Europe, in the stone circles like Stonehenge, in the stumps of piles driven by lake dwellers in Switzerland and else¬ where, and in the windrows of bones and skulls, such as those along the coasts of Denmark.

The Races of Europe

Men have long been accustomed to distinguish certain races or, as we commonly say, breeds of cattle, sheep, or dogs by the observation of certain physical characteristics. Scientists now classify men in the same way; and if a certain race so distin¬ guished seems also to display mental and moral traits of a given sort, these are attributed to long continued life in a certain en¬ vironment rather than to any quality innate in the race itself. There seems to be little support for the belief that any one race has a “mystical” superiority over other races.

The physical characteristics defining the human races are, first, stature, which includes height, breadth, and bodily propor¬ tions. Secondly, pigmentation, which includes the color of the hair and eyes and the type of complexion. This is so noticeable a characteristic that an early classification of man was based upon pigmentation alone, and we still speak of the white race, the yellow race, and the black race. Lastly, shape of the head, which is especially useful in relating living men with dead ones. Indeed, this is the most enduring of all characteristics, being least affected by a change of environment. Stature, on the other hand, is very susceptible to such a change.

Applying these tests, the peoples of Europe fall into three groups. First, the Nordics, found especially in Scandinavia and along the shores of the Baltic Sea. This is one of the tallest races in the world and one of the most muscular, with large bones. Their skin is the whitest of all human beings; their hair is fair, and the eyes are gray. Their skulls are massive and broad, their jaws and teeth well developed. Moral charac¬ teristics, derived from the physical, are sturdiness of disposition, a resolution “never, never to be slaves”, great physical cour¬ age, and, in youth, a certain headlong impulsiveness. A second type, called Alpine, is found in the highlands of central Europe from central France to the Balkans. Such folk are of medium stature and stocky build, with short necks and a tendency to corpulency. Their heads are very short and broad and the back of the head is quite flat. They are dark-skinned, and have brown eyes and dark or brown hair which is straight and coarse.

Mediterranean is the name given to a third type which is found in northern Africa, Syria, the islands of the iEgean, Italy, Sicily, southern France, and Spain; in short, in the whole Medi¬ terranean basin. People of this type are short, slender, and graceful, with small bones and a general lack of robustness. Their skin is dark, and they have dark eyes and dark, often black, hair which may be fine and wavy. Their heads are long and narrow. They are unusually good looking, though the northern peoples may consider them effeminate and lacking in physical courage.

Now it is a rather remarkable fact that all these types of “white” peoples have been present in western Europe from the remotest times of which we have records. In the caves of south¬ ern France have been found the remains of men of the Old Stone Age, all of whose physical characteristics can be matched among living races of the present day. Indeed, the features of these so-called Aurignac men are to be found as those of the predominant element of the population of certain parts of Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, and even of northern Africa at the present time. We may guess, and it is no more than a guess, that these earli¬ est Europeans sifted westward into Europe from some region in Asia. Wave after wave of migration rolled slowly westward. Europe’s present population, therefore, is highly composite, and though we may distinguish in a group of Europeans sufficiently large certain racial characteristics, it is not easy now to find an individual man or woman of purely Alpine or Nordic or Medi¬ terranean features.

In eastern Europe we find to-day other breeds of men who seem to have come in from the southeast and northeast of Asia in more recent times. They are principally of the Mongoloid type. This type is found to-day in the extreme northeast of Russia and also in small “islands” throughout Russia, especially along the upper Volga, and in Esthonia, Finland, and Lapland. The Mongoloids have black hair, swarthy complexions, round beardless faces, high cheek bones, broad short heads, and “ squint’ ’ eyes. They are probably related to the Mongols of central Asia and may have been early wanderers from the Mongol home before that race had become so highly specialized as it is now.

Race and Nationality

As a clue to the trend of European history the study of racial types has only a limited value. In no modern state of Europe is there an unmixed race, as we have seen. A far more fruitful field of inquiry is that of cultural groups. These are the fruit of the long continued life of a people together, usually in the same homeland. Another term for a cultural group is “ nation”. The nation is a highly complex entity, an entity un¬ known, moreover, to the ancient world and to the greater part of the middle ages, but of surpassing interest and importance to the present world. To trace the development of the nation and to determine the factors of which it is composed is one of the major tasks of the student of European history. Nation¬ ality has practically nothing to do with race. A Nordic may be a German, Russian, Frenchman, Italian, Englishman, or Irish¬ man, with equal ease. Nationality has more to do with language, since a common language facilitates the common possession by a group of the ideas, traditions, and literature which enter into its culture. But a cultural group may change its language, es¬ pecially if it employs the instrument of a compulsory school system; or it may get along with several languages as the Swiss and the Belgians do; or people who speak the same language may split into two separate cultural groups, like the American colonists and the English. Long continued possession of the same homeland is an important, almost an essential, condition of nationality. But the heart of the whole matter seems to be sentiment—“to have done great things together in the past, and to wish to do great things together in the future.”

As already noted, cultural or national groups do not always coincide with language groups, though there is a general con¬ formity. There is, of course, no relation at all between the lan¬ guage classification and the racial classification. All of the languages of modern Europe, with a very few exceptions, be¬ long to the same language family, the Aryan or Indo-European. This family is so named because of its relationship to the ancient language of India and Persia. And not only the modern lan¬ guages but Greek and Latin are also members of this family.

The non-Aryan languages of Europe include those of the Turks and Magyars, who came to Europe from Asia after the Aryan dominance had been established, and those of the Basques and the Finns, who may have preceded the coming of the Aryans and may be the sole survivors. The tendency in the middle ages and a tendency which yet continues is for lan¬ guages to decrease steadily in number as localism gives way to nationalism.

Chapter Two

European civilization began in the iEgean world. The student who consults his map will quickly see that the iEgean Sea is really a lake, being almost completely enclosed by land. On the west and north is the mainland of Europe, the Greek penin¬ sula; on the east is Asia Minor; on the south, stretching from west to east nearly the whole distance from the mainland of Europe to the mainland of Asia, is the island of Crete. This “lake” of the iEgean, moreover, is thickly sprinkled with hundreds of islands; the surrounding coast line, European and Asiatic, is deeply indented; there are many small peninsulas, really islands. Thus the whole region abounds in small bits of land. Then, too, these patches of land are very fertile. Barley and wheat, the olive and the vine, flourish in the mild rainy winter and the warm dry summer. It is an area physically suited to the early development of a civilization.

Further, the iEgean world is that part of Europe which was in closest contact with those regions of southwestern Asia and northeastern Africa where civilization in our western world first began. Egypt, Babylonia, Phoenicia, Palestine, and Persia were richly stored with the cultural achievements of many centuries when civilization in the iEgean was in its beginnings. These achievements were freely appropriated by the iEgean world and so passed into the stream of western civilization.

Early Civilization of the IEgean

iEgean civilization first developed in some of the islands, especially in Crete. It began about 3000 b.c. and during the next fifteen centuries reached a high point of development. The iEgeans were of the same dark, slight, Mediterranean type of man as the Egyptians, though the two peoples are readily distinguishable from each other in physical appearance. Their borrowings from Egypt, with which the iEgeans were in con¬ tinuous contact, were numerous and included the potter’s wheel and certain letters of their alphabet. Their borrowings from Babylonia were less extensive but included writing ma¬ terials and the art of seal-cutting. But the iEgeans were not borrowers only. They developed in their favored isles an in¬ digenous culture “no whit inferior to the contemporary cultures of Asia and Egypt.” By 2000 b.c. they had a phonetic art of writing, using the clay tablet. In the “Great Age” of Cretan culture, 1650-1500 b.c., the Minoan pottery was the finest known and was exported to Egypt. To the same age belongs the great palace of the Cretan kings at Cnossus, a palace arranged in the Egyptian manner but without fortifications. From Crete .ZEgean culture spread to the European mainland and flourished in such centers as Tiryns and Mycenae in the Peloponnesus. Troy, on the northwestern coast of Asia Minor, though of in¬ dependent origin seems to have been drawn into the ^Egean “empire.” Of the political history of this empire almost nothing is known. Scholars have not yet succeeded in reading the Cretan language. About 1400 b.c., however, political disaster of some sort overwhelmed the Cretans, probably an invasion of bar¬ barians from the north.

This fleeting glimpse of Cretan culture will serve to place the more brilliant civilization of the Greeks in a truer perspective. The swift rise of Greek culture will seem less of a miracle when we recall that it grew up out of a civilized past twenty-five centuries long. The Athens of Pericles did not suddenly spring to life full grown.

The Greeks

The three hundred years from the seventh to the fourth century b.c. saw in Greece one of the greatest developments of civilization in the history of the world. The Greek people are a fusion of Indo-European invaders from the north with the iEgean natives whose civilization the northerners appropriated. The area of the Greek mainland in Europe is about 45,000 square miles. The land is very mountainous, and mountains and sea combine to divide the land into innumerable small districts—little valleys, short and narrow stretches of coast, and tiny peninsulas. Inevitably there developed a multitude of small states and a great diversity of dialects, religions, and cultures. A cluster of villages would unite around a common stronghold, such as the Acropolis at Athens, to form a city-state, the political unit of Greek life. The earliest city-states were agricultural. The farmers grew wheat, barley, grapes, and olives, on which they chiefly lived. Even later, in the “Great Age” of Greece, ownership of some land, however small a par¬ cel, was almost essential to the possession of the full rights of citizenship. It is evident that we shall go very far astray if we think of the Greek city-states in terms of a modern industrial city. A few thousand or even a few hundred citizens sufficed for an early Greek “polis”. Yet in these little communities there developed an intensity of cultural and political life un¬ paralleled before or since.

An early development of immense consequence for the Hel¬ lenic race was the sowing of these city-states broadcast by colonization. Over-population with consequent land-hunger furnished the driving force, in the main. The little pockets of productive land soon filled up. The sea, with clear visibility and prevailing winds, was a standing invitation to venture forth. Colonization became a fine art with an established technique. The mother-city would furnish its little band of venturesome citizens with a charter, a leader, and a flame from her sacred fire. Faring forth over the water the colonists would found a daughter-city, carefully retaining everything essentially Greek in their way of fife in the new land. The newly founded city thus became an independent center of Hellenic civilization. One Greek city founded more than forty daughter-cities that we know of, and the total number may have been much greater. The islands of the JEgean, the coast of Asia Minor, the entire Black Sea basin, the Nile delta, the coast of northern Africa, southern Italy and Sicily, and the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain were thus colonized. Westward the course of Hellenic civilization took its way. The region of southern Italy and Sicily, so similar to Greece itself in climate and vege¬ tation, became a western Hellas.