Western Europe in the Middle Ages: A Short History

Front matter

JOSEPH R. STRAYER

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK

Introduction

Introduction

What were the Middle Ages? The conventional answer is that they were the centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginnings of modern European civilization. Scholars have argued, and will argue endlessly, as to the exact dates of these two terminal points, but we do not have to wait for them to reach an agreement. Most historians would admit that the Roman Empire was well on its way to decline by the fifth century and that many of the characteristic elements of modern civilization were apparent by 1500. We do not have to be more precise than this—we can say that the Middle Ages run, roughly, from the fifth to the fifteenth century. There will be exceptions to this rule-of-thumb definition—aspects of Roman civilization survive in some parts of Europe long after 400 A.D. and elements of modern civilization appear in Italy well before 1500—but no student of medieval history can say that these transitional forms are completely outside his field of interest.

The Middle Ages extend from the fifth to the fifteenth century. This is a long period, so long that many writers will argue that it has no real unity, that there are many middle ages instead of one. There is force in this argument. We have only to think what our ancestors were like a thousand or even five hundred years ago to wonder whether one of Clovis's German warriors had much in common with a crusader of the twelfth century or an English baron of the Wars of the Roses. Is there any real unity in the Middle Ages, or have we simply developed a convenient catch-basket phrase in which to dump a number of centuries that do not greatly interest us?

To answer this question let us pick a century which everyone will admit was medieval, say the twelfth. How do the ways of living, the basic ideas and ideals of this century differ from those of the Roman Empire and those of the modern world?

In the first place, it is clear that we are dealing with a civilization which, in its complete form, covers only Western Europe. It has little influence on Eastern Europe and even less on Western Asia and Northern Africa. Graeco-Roman civilization had been Mediterranean, not European; it attained its fullest development in Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and North Africa. Modern occidental civilization is oceanic, not European; it is as typical of America, Australia, and parts of Asia and Africa as it is of Western Europe. In the Roman period most of Europe was a backward, colonial region, receiving its institutions and ideas from more advanced communities to the south and east. In the modern period Europe has been first the center and then a segment of a world civilization. But in the twelfth century European civilization stood by itself, neither greatly influencing nor greatly influenced by the civilizations of other continents.

In political and constitutional developments twelfth-century Europe occupies the same middle position. The Roman Empire was not a national state; it was a union of all the peoples who shared the common Mediterranean civilization under a single powerful ruler. The modern world, though it recognizes the fact of a common civilization, is divided into sovereign national states. The twelfth century knew neither the single powerful political unit nor the modern state. Nationalism and sovereignty did not exist, and although the concept of a Commonwealth of Christendom did exist, it found effective expression only in the Church, not in any secular political organization. Every man was subject to many overlapping authorities to the local feudal lord or self-governing town in all ordinary affairs, to the more remote overlord (king, duke, or count) in special cases, to the Church in matters which concerned the welfare of Christendom and the Christian faith. This division of authority made absolutism impossible; neither the unlimited power of the Roman emperor nor the equally unlimited power of the modern sovereign state could exist under such circumstances. On the other hand, the weakness or the absence of large political units increased the cohesiveness of smaller groups. No individual could stand alone; he had to be part of a community, and the community of a village or of a town influenced and controlled the lives of its members to a far greater extent than it does today.

This peculiar political organization was adapted to an equally unusual religious organization. In the Roman Empire the state had controlled religion; the pagan cults were mere agencies of the government, and even the Catholic Church had had to conform to laws and administrative regulations issued by the emperor. In the modern period the churches are usually considered voluntary private associations, completely dissociated from the state, completely dependent on their own moral authority to enforce their rules. In the twelfth century the Church was an independent public authority. It claimed complete freedom of action; no secular ruler could interfere with its officials, its courts, or its laws. But at the same time, the twelfth-century Church insisted that lay authority must support its efforts to preserve the unity of the faith and the rules of Christian morality. The Church determined the values and the goals of European society; it held that lay governments were inferior though independent agencies whose chief duty was to deal with the sordid details of crime and punishment. The idea of a Commonwealth of Christendom found its expression in the Church, and loyalty to the Church was stronger than loyalty to any lay organization.

It is a little more difficult to appreciate the significance of the twelfth century in economic history. At first glance it would seem that there had been little change since the Late Roman Empire. Both in the fourth and in the twelfth centuries the great majority of the population of Europe was engaged in agriculture, and most of these agricultural laborers were unfree. The great difference between the two periods is that the fourth century was a period of declining economic activity, whereas the twelfth century was a period of economic expansion. The Romans of the Late Empire would have been satisfied if they could have kept production and commerce at their old level; the men of the twelfth century were making a great effort to increase production and commerce. They were clearing forests, draining swamps, building new towns, establishing new trading stations in the East, concentrating certain industries in the towns, and even experimenting with new sources of mechanical power, such as the windmill. This rapid expansion makes the twelfth century, in some of its aspects, resemble our own boom periods. For example, emigration agents in the Rhineland told German peasants the familiar story of fertile land on the eastern frontier which could be had for a song. But the controlling ideas of the twelfth century were so different from ours that the resemblances between the two economic systems are less striking than the differences. Strong community feeling and the influence of the Church made group enterprise more important than individual effort. Settlers on the frontier grouped themselves in villages for mutual protection and assistance; they did not set up individual homesteads. The small business men of the towns formed strong associations, not only to guard their political rights but also to suppress economic competition. Even the most individualistic enterprisers of the period, the great merchants who traded across the length and breadth of Europe, found that they had to be backed up by associations of their fellow merchants to enjoy any security. At the same time the Church and the governing classes were very suspicious of profit-seeking individuals. The Church feared, quite rightly, that such men would become too interested in this world to remember the next Kings and nobles feared that the unrestrained drive for profits would undermine the social organization which gave them power. There was general agreement that economic activity should be regulated and controlled in the interests of society and that individual profits were less important than social stability. This is not to say that the profit mo was completely suppressed in the twelfth century, but no one at that time thought that it was or should be the mainspring of human activity. As a result, neither individual capitalists nor the middle class as a whole had the same importance in the twelfth century that they have had in the modern world.

In art and literature, philosophy and science, formal and informal education, the twelfth century diverged sharply from the Roman tradition. It saw the beginnings of a new type of architecture in the early Gothic churches and a new type of literature in the poems of the troubadours and jongleurs. It witnessed the revival of science, long neglected by the Romans, and the first works of scholastic philosophy. The gradual development of the Universities of Bologna and Paris laid the foundations for a new system of education, characterized by formal lecture courses, examinations, and degrees. At the same time the ideal of the cultured gentleman slowly began to take shape in the active social life of the courts of southern France. We have inherited all these traditions, but it is hardly necessary to point out that they have been greatly modified by the passage of time. The Renaissance, in reviving the classical tradition, caused a sharp break in the development of medieval forms of expression, and when these forms were revived in their turn in the nineteenth century they had to be fitted into a new intellectual and material environment. Sir Walter Scott could not write medieval ballads, however much he soaked himself in Middle English poetry, and a Gothic church built around a steel skeleton is not the same kind of church as Notre Dame de Chartres. Even where there was no sharp break with the past, as in the field of science, gradual change led to almost complete transformation of values and objectives. We can see how modern physics developed from the Aristotelian works brought back to the West in the twelfth century, but we cannot think the thoughts of a twelfth-century scholar. The intellectual and artistic tradition of the twelfth century has its roots in the past and bears much of its fruit in the future, but it is clearly an independent tradition; it is neither decadent classicism nor primitive modernism.

If we try to summarize the results attained by this brief discussion we might say that the civilization of the twelfth century had characteristics which clearly separate it from the civilizations of Rome and of the modern world. It was a Western European civilization rather than a Mediterranean or an oceanic civilization. Political power was divided among a hierarchy of interdependent governments rather than concentrated in a world empire or a group of sovereign national states. The Church was independent of secular authority, but it was more than a private association with limited functions; it set the standards and defined the goals for all human activities. In economics there was neither state regulation nor laissez-faire; instead local custom controlled farmers, artisans, and merchants in the interest of the whole community. In Gothic art, chivalric poetry, scholastic philosophy, and the university system of education the twelfth century created forms which were neither classical nor modern. These characteristics of twelfth-century civilization were not only distinct, but also interdependent; they fused into an organic whole. The economic institutions could not have existed without the political and religious institutions; the art and literature were profoundly affected by the religious and political beliefs of the age. The civilization of the twelfth century was remarkably self-sufficient and self-consistent; it had a flavor, a texture, almost a personality, of its own.

Obviously these elements of twelfth-century civilization are not duplicated exactly in any other period of the Middle Ages. But they illustrate the basic assumptions, the social habits, the aspirations of the other medieval centuries. Conscious choice and the force of external circumstances were leading Europeans toward the pattern of twelfth-century civilization long before that pattern could be fully worked out. Conscious choice and force of habit made Europeans cling to the basic pattern of twelfth-century civilization for generations, even though new activities and ideas forced modification of some of its details. There are important differences between the early and late Middle Ages, but these differences represent different stages in the development of a single civilization. From the fifth to the eighth century the wreckage of an older civilization was slowly cleared away. Europe gradually separated itself from the Mediterranean world and worked out its own independent culture, based on Christianity, survivals of Roman institutions and ideas, and Germanic customs. The ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries were a period of adjustment and experimentation, in which Europeans slowly and painfully discovered the most effective institutional and ideological expressions of their basic beliefs and aspirations. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a period of fruition, of full development of all the potentialities of medieval civilization. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries medieval civilization slowly decayed under the impact of the new forces which it had created by its own success. From this point of view there is real unity in the story of the Middle Ages; it is the story of the rise, development, and fall of a great civilization.

It is because the history of the Middle Ages is the history of a civilization that the subject is worth studying. The record of the rise and fall of any civilization deserves careful examination, for the basic problems of all civilizations are similar. When we fully understand how peoples of the past slowly became capable of organizing and integrating their efforts, how they accomplished their great and characteristic work, how they eventually lost their ability to do constructive work and slipped into stagnant or retrogressive activities, then we will understand more about the state of our own civilization. The medieval experience is especially important — first, because we have more information about it than any comparable cycle — second, because it has contributed directly to our own way of life. Too many people still think that the Middle Ages are merely a stagnant pit which lies between the heights of classical and of Renaissance civilization, and that all our legacy from the past was carried over the bridges which Renaissance thinkers threw across the medieval pit to the firm ground of Graeco-Roman learning. This is true even of people who deposit money in a bank, who elect representatives to a national assembly, who rely on the precedents of the English common law, who receive degrees from universities and believe that science is an important part of education, who worship in Gothic churches, and who read books written in modern European languages. They would find their lives rather limited and unsatisfactory if they could do none of these things, and yet the basic idea of every one of these activities was worked out in the Middle Ages and not in ancient Greece or Rome. Our civilization has roots in the Middle Ages as well as in the classical period, and the medieval roots often contribute more nourishment than the classical ones. The story of medieval civilization is worth knowing, and it is that story which is told, in its barest outlines, in this book.

The Making of Europe

The Roman Empire

I. THE ROMAN EMPIRE

At the beginning of the history of Europe stands the Roman Empire, and all the early part of the Middle Ages lies in the shadow cast by this great state. Yet the civilization of the Roman Empire was not wholly or even primarily European; it was based largely on the older civilizations of the Mediterranean basin. Alexander and his successors had fused Greek, Egyptian, and Syrian traditions into a common Hellenistic culture, and it was from this Hellenistic culture that the Romans drew most of their art and literature, their philosophy and religion, and even some of their ideas of government. Latin never supplanted Greek as the common language of the eastern part of the Mediterranean world, and the Romans never caught up to the peoples of the Levant in many important activities. Even at the height of the Empire, Alexandria was more important than Rome as an intellectual and artistic center, and Mediterranean trade was dominated by Syrians rather than by Italians. The great contribution of the Romans was the creation of a political organization which gave unity and peace to the Mediterranean basin for over two centuries. Peace and unity made it possible for the essential elements of the civilization of the eastern Mediterranean to be firmly established in the western part of the basin, and to spread, though less securely, beyond the Mediterranean watershed into western Spain, northern Gaul, the Rhineland, and Britain.

The Roman Empire was made by men who desired to see their state strong, and secure from any conceivable foreign danger.

The title of this chapter is borrowed from the excellent book of Christopher Dawson, which deals in detail with the matters briefly outlined in this chapter. Readers interested in the earlier part of the period will find many simulating ideas in F. Lot, The End of the Ancient World. Rival military powers were ruthlessly destroyed, and conquered peoples were plundered that Rome might be great. During the period of rapid expansion Roman rule was always harsh and often corrupt. The only benefit it offered was the gradual extinction of international warfare, and it was difficult for suffering subjects to see that this was much of a gain. But as the position of Rome became more secure, and as Roman political institutions became more stable, the character of Roman government improved. Partly from the Greek philosophers, partly from their own experience, the Romans developed the concepts of a fundamental law binding all men, and of an ideal justice in which all should participate. Inspired by these ideals, guided by the great emperors of the second century A.D., the Roman Empire lost its predatory character and became a universal commonwealth. Inhabitants of Rome and Italy lost their special privileges, the rights of Roman citizenship were extended to almost all subjects of the Empire, and the provinces flourished in the peace and security provided by an honest and efficient government. As distinctions between conqueror and conquered disappeared, the Empire was accepted by all its subjects as a desirable and permanent form of political organization. Yet just as the Empire succeeded in creating a real community of interest and feeling in the Mediterranean basin, it began to decay. This decay is one of the great puzzles of history, and no one has ever been able to explain it in a completely satisfactory way. A partial explanation may be suggested by a discussion of certain weaknesses which existed in the Empire.

The most obvious weakness of the Roman Empire was political. The Republic had failed because it could not keep its officials from fighting for the spoils of power. Under the Empire this danger was avoided by steadily increasing the power of the emperor until no other authority in the state could resist his orders. But the imperial office was at first considered a temporary expedient and it never was placed on an absolutely permanent basis. This was especially true when it came to the question of succession. The new emperor might be the real or adopted heir of his predecessor, he might be elected by the Senate, or he might be chosen by the most powerful section of the army. No one of these methods was followed exclusively, and the uncertainty about the principle of succession frequently led to civil war. Until the third century these wars did no great damage, but after 235 there was a period of fifty years in which it seemed impossible to create a stable government. Emperors were made by intrigues in the bureaucracy or by plots in the army, and were destroyed by their rivals almost as fast as they were made. The army was occupied almost exclusively with civil wars, and barbarians raided all the provinces of the Empire and even built pirate fleets on the shores of the Mediterranean. The great generals who emerged at the end of this period of disorder, such as Aurelian and Diocletian, were finally able to restore peace and unity, but only at the price of turning the Empire into a military despotism.

This accentuated another evil which had been growing steadily since the last years of the Republic — the great majority of the inhabitants of the Empire could not participate in the work of government. The poorer classes were completely debarred from political life during the first century A.D., but the early emperors left local government in the hands of the middle class and allowed the aristocratic Senate some voice in imperial affairs. But local governments ran into financial difficulties and were not as efficient or as honest as the emperors wished, so their powers were steadily curtailed. The Senate was often a center of intrigue against the emperor, and the military despots of the third and fourth centuries would not tolerate such a rival. Senators were given great social prestige and high-sounding titles, but they were deprived of all political responsibilities. By the fourth century all significant acts of government were the work of the emperor and his household, which had developed into a huge bureaucracy. This imperial absolutism was not deliberately tyrannical, nor was it especially corrupt or extravagant. It was often harsh and inflexible, and sometimes slow and inefficient. The emperors of the period were soldiers, terribly anxious to preserve the Empire, but apt to reduce all difficulties to military terms and to use military discipline as their only solution to all problems. When municipal officials found the burden of tax-collecting too great and tried to avoid holding office, the emperors made them hereditary servants of the state, bound to perform their unpopular duties from generation to generation. When bakers and boatmen began to find their occupations unprofitable they too were ordered to remain at their posts and to train their sons to succeed them. Small farmers who had lost their lands and had become tenants on great estates were also bound to their occupation. They could not give up their leases, nor could their landlords dispossess them; each family of tenants was to continue to cultivate the same patch of land forever. The civilian inhabitants of the Empire were to be the supply corps of the army, and like the army, they were to do their work without questioning orders or expecting special consideration for individual needs.

The absence of fixed constitutional principles had turned the Roman Empire into a military despotism. By the fourth century the army controlled the state, and the chief problem of the emperors was to control the army. Their task was made no easier by the fact that the army was no longer a Roman army, in any sense of the word. Both political and economic pressures barred Roman citizens from military service. The emperors were suspicious of members of the upper classes who sought military distinction, and succeeded in keeping them from serving as officers. Poorer citizens, sinking into economic servitude, could not be released from their tasks for military service. By the third century it was no longer possible to fill the ranks of the army from the inhabitants of the Empire, and the emperors had to seek their soldiers beyond the frontiers. Thousands of barbarians, especially Germans, were taken into the army; eventually whole tribes were hired as units, fighting under the commands of their chiefs. These barbarians were brave soldiers, loyal to their generals as long as they were paid, but their discipline was not good and they were not especially devoted to the Empire. They wanted to enjoy the benefits of Ro civilization — the cleared lands, the regular food supply, the well-made clothes and fine weapons — but they did not understand the civilization which they wanted to enjoy. They could not preserve it; they could not repair and restore it when it decayed. And yet these barbarian soldiers, with their limited outlook and small sense of civic responsibility, were the source of political power in the Empire. They were the only group who could express their discontent with the government, the only group whose wishes had to be heeded by the men in power. Unfortunately for the Empire, the desires of the barbarians were always concerned with their own welfare and never with the welfare of the state. They would revolt to make a favorite general emperor, to gain extra pay, to force an allotment of land to veteran troops, to gain high offices for their native leaders. They would never revolt to change the political system which was strangling patriotism, civic responsibility, and private initiative. Like the civilians, the soldiers accepted the Empire as a natural phenomenon which was as permanent and unchangeable as the solar system. The Empire was there; they made the best terms with it they could, but it was not their job to keep it going. All responsibility, all initiative, lay with the emperor and his bureaucrats. If they failed to do their duty, if they made disastrous mistakes, no body of citizens or of soldiers could take their place or repair their errors.

The political situation was bad; the economic situation was even worse. The imperial government, most of the city governments, and practically all ordinary citizens were bankrupt long before the fall of Rome. This impoverishment of the Empire increased the sense of strain and futility which contributed to the final collapse. Men who could not make a decent living after honest effort, men who saw their standard of living and their social status steadily diminishing, could not be expected to be very much interested in preserving a civilization which had ruined them. And yet the Empire included the richest regions and the most fertile lands of the ancient world. If Greece could prosper when it had been divided into dozens of petty states, if Spain and Gaul could attract traders when all land and sea routes were dangerous, why should the union of these lands with many others produce a depression instead of a boom?

In the first place, the political institutions of the Empire were out of step with its economic institutions. Politically, the Mediterranean basin had been united in a highly centralized state; economically it was still divided into a number of almost self-sufficient regions. The Empire had to support a large bureaucracy, and an even larger army; it had to defend the almost impossibly long frontiers which enclosed the Mediterranean world. The cost of the imperial government was not great by our standards, but it seemed very high to men of the fourth century A.D. The total population of the Empire was much less than that of the same regions today, which meant that each individual had to carry a larger share of the burdens of government.

Even worse, the chief occupation of the inhabitants of the Empire was agriculture, so that wealth per capita was very low. The Romans despised commerce, which remained largely in the hands of Syrians and other peoples of the Levant. This gave the eastern half of the Empire certain advantages over the West, but even in the East commerce added less to the wealth of the Empire than might have been expected. Trade in oriental luxury goods formed a large part of the stream of Roman commerce and Rome had little to offer India, Persia, and China in return for imports of silks, spices, perfumes, and precious stones. A steady stream of gold and silver flowed from the Empire to the Orient, leaving the Mediterranean world short of specie. The absence of any well-developed credit system made it impossible to replace the precious metals with paper, and the resulting disorganization of the currency made it difficult to do business of any kind. Active internal trade would have eased these monetary problems, but internal trade seems to have declined in the last centuries of the Empire. All the Mediterranean lands produced the same agricultural staples — wheat, olive oil, and wine — so that only the largest cities had to import food from any distance. There were not enough of these cities to support a flourishing grain trade, and in any case Rome and Constantinople drew their food supplies largely from the imperial estates of North Africa and Egypt. Trade in manufactured articles could not take the place of trade in food because the Romans, with abundant slave labor, never took much interest in efficient production. They used few machines; they clung to cumbersome methods of production, and in these circumstances no one manufacturing center could have any great advantages over other districts. Except for luxury articles, each province of the Empire was relatively self-sufficient, and even within the provinces rural districts drew little from the towns. Any great estate produced most of the food needed by its inhabitants, and the artisans who lived there could make all the furniture, pottery, tools, and clothing which were required. In short, the Empire was never really an economic unit, and the lack of common economic interests made disintegration easier.

Political autocracy and economic stagnation weakened loyalty to the emperor and to the Empire. The rulers of imperial Rome had tried hard enough to build up loyalty with their temples devoted to the imperial cult, their monuments and public buildings, their ceremonies and festivals. Their efforts failed partly because the cult of emperor-worship and Rome-worship was synthetic, foisted on the people from above instead of springing spontaneously from popular beliefs and experiences — even more because the average inhabitant of the Roman Empire could take no interest in the affairs of an organization in which he played no significant role. At the very end of the Empire the emperors tried to use religious belief to take the place of the civic loyalty which was missing. They accepted Christianity as the religion of the state and hoped that devotion to the new religion would inspire devotion to the protectors and upholders of the faith. This attempt also failed, except in the East. Throughout most of the Empire, Christian leaders were unwilling to bind themselves too closely to the political fortunes of the state in which they lived. They accepted the Empire as a fact; they did not insist upon it as a necessity. The greatest Christian writer of the West, St. Augustine, said that the all-important community was the Heavenly City of God and that compared to the Heavenly City the fortunes of earthly states were unimportant. He and his friends withdrew from the service of the state, and though they performed notable works of charity and piety in their communities the Empire was nevertheless deprived of men who might have been outstanding political leaders. Thus, in the West, religious conviction did not reinforce patriotism, and men who would have died rather than renounce Christianity accepted the rule of conquering barbarian kings without protest.