The New Penguin History of the World (99 page)

The values of the nobility were, at bottom, military. Through their gradual refinement there emerged slowly the notions of honour, loyalty and disinterested self-sacrifice, which were to be held up as models for centuries to well-born boys and girls. The ideal of chivalry articulated these values and softened the harshness of a military code. It was blessed by the Church, which provided religious ceremonies to accompany the bestowal of knighthood and the knights’ acceptance of Christian duties. The heroic figure who came supremely to embody the notion was the mythological English King Arthur, whose cult spread to many lands. It was to live on in the ideal of the gentleman and gentlemanly conduct, however qualified in practice.

Of course, it never worked as it should have done. But few great creative myths do; neither did the feudal theory of dependence, nor does democracy. The pressures of war and, more fundamentally, economics, were always at work to fragment and confuse social obligations. The increasing unreality of the feudal concept of lord and vassal was one factor favouring the growth of kingly power. The coming of a money economy made further inroads, service had increasingly to be paid for in cash, and rents became more important than the services that had gone with them. Some sources of feudal income remained fixed in terms made worthless by changes in real prices. Lawyers evolved devices which enabled new aims to be realized within a ‘feudal’ structure more and more unreal and worm-eaten.

Medieval nobility had been for a long time very open to new entrants, but usually this became less and less true as time passed. In some places attempts were actually made to close for ever a ruling caste. Yet European society was all the time generating new kinds of wealth and even of power which could not find a place in the old hierarchies and challenged them. The most obvious example was the emergence of rich merchants. They often bought land; it was not only the supreme economic investment in a world where there were few, but it might open the way to a change of status for which landownership was either a legal or social necessity. In Italy merchants sometimes themselves became the nobility of trading and manufacturing cities. Everywhere, though, they posed a symbolic challenge to a world which had, to begin with, no theoretical place for them. Soon, they evolved their own social forms, guilds, mysteries, corporations, which gave new definitions to their social role.

The rise of the merchant class was almost a function of the growth of towns; the appearance of merchants was inseparably linked with the most dynamic element in medieval European civilization. Unwittingly, at least at first, towns and cities held within their walls much of the future history of Europe. Though their independence varied greatly in law and practice,
there were parallels in other countries to the Italian communal movement. Towns in the German east were especially independent, which helps to explain the appearance there of the powerful Hanseatic League of more than a hundred and fifty free cities. The Flemish towns also tended to enjoy a fair degree of freedom: French and English towns usually had less. Yet lords everywhere sought the support of cities against kings, while kings sought the support of townsmen and their wealth against over-mighty subjects. They gave towns charters and privileges. The walls which surrounded the medieval city were the symbol as well as a guarantee of its immunity. The landlords’ writ did not run in them and sometimes their anti-feudal implication was even more explicit: villeins, for example, could acquire their freedom in some towns if they lived in them for a year and a day. ‘The air of the town makes men free’ said a German proverb. The communes and within them the guilds were associations of free men for a long time isolated in a world unfree. The burgher – the
bourgeois
, the dweller in bourg or borough – was a man who stood up for himself in a universe of dependence.

Much of the history behind this remains obscure because it is for the most part the history of obscure men. The wealthy merchants who became the typically dominant figures of the new town life and fought for their corporate privileges are visible enough, but their humbler predecessors are usually not. In earlier times a merchant can have been little but the pedlar of exotica and luxuries which the medieval European estate could not provide for itself. Ordinary commercial exchange for a long time hardly needed a middleman: craftsmen sold their own goods and cultivators their own crops. Yet somehow in the towns there emerged men who dealt between them and the countryside, and their successors were to be men using capital to order in advance the whole business of production for the market.

In the blossoming of its urban life lies buried much which made European history different from that of other continents. Neither in the ancient world (except, perhaps, classical Greece) nor in Asia or America, did city life develop the political and social power it came to show in Europe. One reason was the absence of destructively parasitic empires of conquest to eat away at the will to betterment; Europe’s enduring political fragmentation made rulers careful of the geese which laid the golden egg they needed to compete with their rivals. A great sack of a city was a noteworthy event in the European Middle Ages; it was the inescapable and recurrent accompaniment of warfare in much of Asia. This, of course, could not be the whole story. It also must have mattered that, for all its obsession with status, Europe had no caste system such as that of India, no ideological
homogeneity so intense and stultifying as China’s. Even when rich, the city-dwellers of other cultures seem to have aquiesced in their own inferiority. The merchant, the craftsman, the lawyer and the doctor had roles in Europe, though, which at an early date made them more than simple appendages of landed society. Their society was not closed to change and self-advancement; it offered routes to self-improvement other than the warrior’s or the court favourite’s. Townsmen were equal and free, even if some were more equal than others.

It need not surprise us that practical, legal and personal freedom was much greater for men than for women (though there were still those of both sexes who were legally unfree at the bottom of society). Whether they were of noble or common blood, medieval European women suffered, by comparison with their menfolk, from important legal and social disabilities, just as they have done in every civilization which has ever existed. Their rights of inheritance were often restricted; they could inherit a fief, for example, but could not enjoy personal lordship, and had to appoint men to carry out the obligations that went with it. In all classes below the highest there was much drudgery to be done by women; even in the twentieth century there were European peasant women who worked on the land as women still do in Africa and Asia today.

There were theoretical elements in the subjection of women and a large contribution was made to them by the Church. In part this was a matter of its traditionally hostile stance towards sexuality. Its teaching had never been able to find any justification for sex except for its role in the reproduction of the species. Woman being seen as the origin of Man’s fall and a standing temptation to concupiscence, the Church threw its weight behind the domination of society by men. Yet this is not all there is to be said. Other societies have done more to seclude and oppress women than Christendom, and the Church at least offered women the only respectable alternative to domesticity available until modern times; the history of the female religious is studded with outstanding women of learning, spirituality and administrative gifts. The position of at least a minority of well-born women, too, was marginally bettered by the idealization of women in the chivalric codes of behaviour of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There lay in this a notion of romantic love and an entitlement to service, a stage towards a higher civilization.

At bottom, no Christian Church could ever deny to women so much as was denied them in some other cultures. The deepest roots of what later generations were to think of as the ‘liberation’ of women lie, for this reason, in western culture, whose role in so many places was to be disturbing, exotic and revolutionary. Yet such ideas in the Middle Ages can
have had little impact even on the lives of European women. Among themselves, medieval European women were more equal before death than would be rich and poor women in Asia today, but then so were men. Women lived less long than men, it seems, and frequent confinements and a high mortality rate no doubt explain this. Medieval obstetrics remained, as did other branches of medicine, rooted in Aristotle and Galen; there was nothing better available. But men died young, too. Aquinas lived only to forty-seven and philosophy is not nowadays thought to be physically exacting. This was about the age to which a man of twenty in a medieval town might normally expect to survive: he was lucky to have got as far already and to have escaped the ferocious toll of infant mortality which imposed an average life of about thirty-three years and a death rate about twice that of modern industrial countries. Judged by the standards of antiquity, so far as they can be grasped, this was of course by no means bad.

This reminds us of one last novelty in the huge variety of the Middle Ages; they left behind the means for us to measure just a little more of the dimensions of human life. From these centuries come the first collections of facts upon which reasoned estimates can be made. When in 1087 William the Conqueror’s officers rode out into England to interrogate its inhabitants and to record its structure and wealth in the Domesday Book, they were unwittingly pointing the way to a new age. Other collections of data, usually for tax purposes, followed in the next few centuries. Some have survived, together with the first accounts which reduce farming and business to quantities. Thanks to them historians can talk with a little more confidence about late medieval society than about that of any earlier time.

11
New Limits, New Horizons

In the Near East Europeans were until very recently called ‘Franks’, a word first used in Byzantium to mean western Christians. It caught on elsewhere and was still being used in various distortions and mispronunciations from the Persian Gulf to China a thousand years later. This is more than just a historical curiosity; it is a helpful reminder that non-Europeans were struck from the start by the unity, not the diversity, of the western peoples and long thought of them as one.

EUROPE LOOKS OUTWARDS

The roots of this idea can be seen even in the remote beginnings of Europe’s long and victorious assault on the world, when a relaxation of pressure on her eastern land frontier and northern coasts at last began to be felt. By
AD
1000 or so, the barbarians were checked; then they began to be Christianized. Within a short space of time Poland, Hungary, Denmark and Norway came to be ruled by Christian kings. One last great threat, the Mongol onslaught, still lay ahead, it is true, but that was unimaginable at that time. By the eleventh century, too, the rolling back of Islam had already begun. Palermo was back under Christian rule in 1071. The Islamic threat to southern Europeans diminished because of the decline into which the Abbasid caliphate had fallen in the eighth and ninth centuries.

The struggle with Islam was to continue vigorously until the fifteenth century. It was given unity and fervour by Christianity, the deepest source of European self-consciousness. Similar fervour came to be generated among Muslims, at times proclaimed as a
Jihad
or Holy War, but its effects seemed less far-reaching and profound than among Europeans whom religion bound together in a great moral and spiritual enterprise. It fed their sense of identity. But that was only one side of the coin. It also provided a licence for the predatory appetites of the military class which dominated lay society. Crusading warfare would offer loot and licence on
a scale unavailable in Christendom’s domestic wars. They could spoil the pagans with clear consciences. The Normans, always great predators, were in the vanguard, taking south Italy and Sicily from the Arabs, a task effectively complete by 1100. (Almost incidentally they swallowed the last Byzantine possessions in the West as well.) The other great struggle in Europe against Islam was the epic of Spanish history, the Reconquest, whose climax came in 1492, when Granada, the last Muslim capital of Spain, fell to the armies of the Catholic monarchs.

The Spaniards had come to see the Reconquest as a religious cause, and as such it had been able to attract land-hungry warriors from all over Europe since its beginnings in the eleventh century. But it had also drawn on the same religious revival and quickening of vigour in the West which expressed itself in a succession of great enterprises in Syria and Palestine which are remembered as ‘the Crusades’. Strictly applied, that name covers a much longer drawn-out and geographically more widely spread series of events than those of the couple of centuries or so which are usually thought of as the crusading era. The essential of the crusade was the authorization by the pope that those taking part in it would be entitled to ‘indulgences’, allowing them remissions of the time to be spent after death in purgatory and, sometimes, the status of martyr if they died while actually on crusade. On this basis, crusades were still being launched as late as the fifteenth century, often against targets far different from the ambition to do great deeds in the Holy Land which had fired the first crusaders – against Moors in Spain, pagan Slavs in the Baltic lands, Christian heretics in France, and even against Christian monarchs who had incurred the wrath of the Pope.

As shaping forces, though, the first four crusades were incomparably the most important. Though unsuccessful in their aim – they did not restore the Holy Land to Christian rule – they left profound legacies. In the Levant they briefly established new colonial societies; they gravely, perhaps mortally, wounded the eastern Christian empire; above all, they enduringly marked the psychology and self-consciousness of western Europeans. The earliest and most successful was launched in 1096. Within three years the crusaders recaptured Jerusalem, where they celebrated the triumph of the Gospel of Peace by an appalling massacre of their prisoners, women and children included. The second crusade (1147–9), in contrast,
began
with a successful massacre (of Jews in the Rhineland), but thereafter, though the presence of an emperor and a king of France gave it greater importance than its predecessor, it was a disaster. It failed to recover Edessa, the city whose loss had largely provoked it, and did much to discredit St Bernard, its most fervent advocate (though it had a by-product of some importance when an English fleet took Lisbon from the Arabs
and it passed into the hands of the King of Portugal). Then in 1187 Saladin recaptured Jerusalem for Islam. The third crusade which followed (1189–92) was socially the most spectacular. A German emperor (drowned in the course of it) and the kings of England and France all took part. They quarrelled and the crusaders failed to recover Jerusalem. No great monarch answered Innocent III’s appeal to go on the next crusade, though many land-hungry magnates did. The Venetians financed the expedition, which left in 1202. It was at once diverted by interference in the dynastic troubles of Byzantium, which suited the Venetians, who helped to recapture Constantinople for a deposed emperor. There followed the terrible sack of the city in 1204 and that was the end of the fourth crusade, whose monument was the establishment of a ‘Latin Empire’ at Constantinople, which survived there only for a half-century.