Europe: A History (78 page)

Holland, however, was the main focus neither of politics of the Netherlands nor of the Dutch language. Various forms of proto-Middle Dutch were spoken right
through the Low Countries as far west as Kortrijk (Courtrai) and Rijsel (Lille). French was dominant in Hainault, Liege, and Namur and in the speech of the nobility in general. Low German overlapped on the eastern borders in Guelders. But the greatest pool of Dutch-speakers was undoubtedly contained in the cities of Flanders. Dialectical nuances between
Vlaams
and
Hollandisch
were not marked. Holland itself was still engaged in assimilating Frisian, Frankish, and Saxon elements. Frisian in particular, which was the closest of the Germanic idioms to English, was still strong in north Holland and the islands. The establishment of Holland as the home of standard Dutch, or
Nederlands
, was the work of a much later age.

Dutch literature, too, was largely written in Flanders. Thirteenth-century Holland did produce a number of valuable texts, including the Egmont Chronicle and an animal fantasy
Van den Vos Reinarde
(c.1270), by a certain Willem. But the leading names, such as Jacob van Maerlent (c.1235–71), author of
Alexander’s Feasts
(1258) and born at Bruges, were Flemings.

Foreign trade flowed as yet quite feebly. Dordrecht, where a castle had been built to owerawe ships plying between the Rhineland and the North Sea, was the only port of substance. It had contacts with England, and hopes of drawing the lucrative English staple from the more prosperous Flemish ports along the coast. There were no regular links with the Baltic, or with Russia.
⁵¹
Social conditions in Holland did not conform to the standard structures of the ‘age of feudalism’. Feudal institutions, in fact, were weak. Serfdom was rare beyond the estates of the Church, and settlements of free peasants and independent fisherfolk were common. The nobles, though well integrated into the practices and mores of knighthood and landownership, were not subordinated in any systematic way to feudal superiors. The cities, though small, could look to the example of the nearby Rhineland, and were set to play a preponderant role. Religious life in Holland was also somewhat untypical. The bishop of Utrecht was losing much of his former power, and did not exercise the same degree of secular and legal authority that flourished in the neighbouring diocese of Liège. Despite a number of new foundations, neither the friars nor the new monastic orders had impressed their presence very strongly. Frisia was a notorious refuge of pagan survivals; rebellious mystic sects were an established fact.

Any description of Holland’s early history belies the popular misconception that Europe’s later nations must already have existed in embryo in the medieval period. The thirteenth century marks the mid-point of the span which separates our contemporary age from the so-called ‘Birth of Europe’ amidst the ruins of the Classical World. One might have expected that the national communities, which came to dominate the end of the story, would at least be discernible, albeit in a half-formed stage of development. Yet this was not so. In the case of the Low Countries, familiar terms such as ‘Holland’, ‘Dutch’, and ‘Netherlands’ all possessed different connotations from those which they later acquired. The modern myth about the permanent union of a ‘nation’ and its ‘soil’ was plainly irrelevant
In the thirteenth century Holland was not the core of a developing Dutch nation. Indeed, much of the soil which 300 and 400 years later would form the central territorial base of Dutch national consciousness had not yet been deposited.

Most of Europe in 1265 displayed the same lack of recognizable national communities. In the middle of the Christian
Reconquista
, the Iberian states of Portugal, Castile, and Aragón had little awareness of a common Spain. In the year of Dante’s birth, the defeat of the Hohenstaufen was putting an end to the dream of a united Italy. In the midst of the Mongol invasions and the ‘age of fragmentation’, a united Poland was no more than a memory. There was no longer any Rus’, let alone a sense of Russia. A kingdom of England did exist, on the ruins of the Plantagenet empire; but it still had stronger connections with the Continent, in Gascony and Aquitaine, than with Wales or Ireland. Its French-speaking Anglo-Norman aristocracy did not yet share a common culture with the English people, and the baronial opposition was led by Continental adventurers like de Montfort. There was no concept of Britishness whatsoever. The kingdom of Scotland was still disputing its territory with the Norwegians, who had just invaded the northern isles. Under St Louis, the kingdom of France now stretched from the Channel to the Mediterranean. But it was an amalgam of the most diverse elements that would have to disintegrate before they could be reconstituted for a second time as a more cohesive whole. As the interregnum showed, the German Empire had collapsed in all but name. It was hopelessly rent by the competing interests of its German and its Italian territories on either side of the Alps. There was no such country as Switzerland; and the Habsburgs were yet to move to Austria. The Prussia of the Teutonic Knights was in the earliest decades of its career; but it bore no resemblance to the later Prussia of the Hohenzollerns (who in 1265 were still ensconced in their native castle in Swabia). In Scandinavia, Norway had broken away from Danish control; but the break was not due to last. The Swedes, like the Lithuanians, were embroiled in multinational conquests in the East. Bohemia under Ottokar II (r. 1253–78) was at the pinnacle of its glory, having just annexed Austria and Styria. Hungary was in a state of collapse, following the two Mongol raids, and was facing the end of the native árpád dynasty. The Byzantine Empire, Europe’s oldest polity, had recovered Constantinople four years before, and had driven out the Latin usurpers to their toeholds in Greece. None of these entities was destined to survive into modern times.

It would be problematical, therefore, to talk of national states at any point in the thirteenth century. But if national identities were judged to be developing effectively in any place at the time, it could only have been in some of the small countries who had successfully segregated themselves from their neighbours. Portugal was a candidate for this, as was Denmark, and, in the Balkans, Serbia and Bulgaria. Both Serbia and Bulgaria had re-established their independence from Byzantium in the 1180s. More importantly, they both created their own national Orthodox Churches with their own patriarchs—Bulgaria in 1235, Serbia in 1346. This step gave them a powerful instrument for forging a separate identity, for educating a national élite, for political publicity, and for the sanctification of
national institutions. It was a step which none of the countries of Latin Christendom could take until the Reformation, and which Muscovite Russia did not take until 1589. It strengthened the bonds of these two Slav peoples whose cohesion would be tested through 500 years of Ottoman rule.

For Europe was living out its last few decades before the Ottomans, and the second great Muslim advance. The silk road to the East was still open. Christian travellers were reporting on their journeys to Tartary. In the year that a ‘Venice of the North’ was founded on the Amstel, Marco Polo set out from the Rialto for China.

Dutch historians, like everyone else, have had to contend with the habit of reading history backwards. When national histories were first formulated in the nineteenth century, the Low Countries had just been definitively divided into the kingdoms of Belgium and Holland; and it was accepted form to maintain that separate Flemish and Dutch communities had been present from the earliest times. Great pains were taken to show that the medieval churches of Sluis, for example, on one side of the Scheldt, were pearls of the Hollandish style, while the churches of Damme on the other bank were treasures of the Flemish heritage. It took a great leap of the imagination for historians to demonstrate that separate Dutch and Belgian traditions did not pre-date the Dutch Revolt of 1566–1648 (see PP- 534–9) which put an arbitrary stop on the previous growth of a shared Netherlands consciousness. It was more difficult to suggest in the early chapters of the story that little sense of a common identity existed, and still more that Holland might not have lain at the heart of Dutchness. There were many more twists in the tale, under Burgundian and Habsburg rule, and many fundamental shifts in economic and demographic patterns, before the ‘Land of the Dams’ could assume its modern form and function. After all, it was not until 1593 that Carolus Clusius (1526–1609), Professor of Medicine at Leiden, received the very first tulip bulbs from Turkey and planted them in the fertile flowerfields between Leiden and Haarlem.

In all these matters of nationality, the key element is consciousness. As one Dutch historian explained, nationality can be observed neither in the blood, nor in the soil, nor even on the tongue:

Nationality exists in the minds of men,… its only conceivable habitat… Outside men’s minds there can be no nationality, because nationality is a manner of looking at oneself not an entity
an sich
. Common sense is able to detect it, and the only human discipline that can describe and analyse it is psychology … This awareness, this sense of nationality, this national sentiment, is more than a characteristic of the nation. It is nationhood itself.
⁵²

In the thirteenth century, in the midst of the feudal strife, it is very doubtful whether the local patriotism of Holland could have started to merge into any sense of general solidarity with the Low Countries as a whole. Three hundred years before the stirring and formative experiences of the Dutch Revolt, it is certain that the half-formed northern provinces, such as Holland, could not have
possessed much common consciousness
vis-à-vis
the southern provinces. One can only conclude that the Dutch nation did not then exist. This is an object lesson for the whole of medieval Europe.

After which one may be tempted to enquire as to where, if not in nations, the thirteenth-century consciousness actually resided. The only answer must be ‘there was what there was’. Medieval Europeans were conscious of belonging to their native village or town, and to a group possessing a local language whose members could communicate without recourse to Latin or Greek. They were aware of belonging to a body of men and women who acknowledged the same feudal lord; to a social estate, which shared the same privileges; above all, to the great corporation of Christendom. Beyond that, as the greatest son of the 1260s would soon describe, one could only wait for Death and the Day of Judgement. Then at last one could learn to which of the really important social groups one belonged—to the passengers on the ferry of the Damned, to the company of penitents sailing for Purgatory, or perhaps to the choirs of Paradise.

*
Robert le Bougre. Thanks to their Bogumil connections, the Cathars were widely known as
boúgars
a corruption of ‘Bulgars’. Also, since the
perfecti
practised severe sexual celibacy, they were widely accused of sodomy. Hence the evolution in the meaning of‘buggery’.

PESTIS

Christendom in Crisis
, c.
1250–1493

T
HERE
is a sense of fatalism about life in the later Middle Ages. People knew that Christendom was sick; they knew that the ideals of the Gospel of Love were far removed from prevailing reality; but they had little idea of how to cure it. The senior Christian state, the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to a pathetic rump. The Holy Roman Empire could not control its own mighty subjects, let alone exercise leadership over others. The Papacy was falling into the quagmire of political dependence. Feudal particularism reached the point where every city, every princeling, had to fight incessantly for survival. The world was ruled by brigandage, superstition, and the plague. When the Black Death struck, the wrath of God was clearly striking at Christendom’s sins. ‘According to a popular belief, no-one since the beginning of the great Western Schism had entered Paradise.’
¹

At the same time, ‘the violent tenor’ of medieval life, its ‘vehement pathos’, had so intensified the pains and pleasures of living that modern sensibility is said to be barely capable of grasping them. ‘The violent contrasts and impressive forms lent a tone of excitement and passion to everyday life, and tended to produce that perpetual oscillation between despair and distracted joy, between cruelty and pious tenderness, which characterises the Middle Ages.’
²