The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

1000 to 1300

	Basil the Bulgar-Slayer
	The Normans Go to Italy
	William the Conqueror
	The Norman Kingdoms
	The Papal Investiture Controversy
	El Cid and the Reconquest
	Byzantium Under Siege Again
	Frederick Barbarossa
	Innocent III
	Commerce in the High Middle Ages
	Population Growth and Medieval Republics
	The Plantagenets
	Centralization in France
	Frederick II, Il Stupor Mundi
	The Magna Carta and the First Parliament
	The Evolution of Castles
	Central Europe's Technological Experiment
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Basil II.

Early in his reign the Russians converted to Orthodox Christianity (988), giving the Empire the powerful ally it had long been seeking. In 994 the nearest Arab state, the Fatimid Caliphate, defeated the Byzantine forces on the Orontes River, besieged Aleppo and threatened Antioch. Basil personally led the rescue army, and unlike most commanders, he did not call off the campaign in the winter months, but stayed in the field constantly. By 999 he had restored the status quo in Syria, and the Arabs did not give Byzantium any more trouble. This allowed Basil to turn his attention to the Empire's main enemy in Europe, the Bulgars.

The first time Basil met the Bulgars, they defeated him (986), but that was the only time they came out ahead. For thirteen years he fought them constantly, chipping away at the Bulgar kingdom, until in 1014 he surrounded and captured the Bulgar army in a mountain pass. The Bulgar king, Samuel, escaped to the city of Prilep, and Basil achieved his final, terrible victory by returning Samuel's army to him there. 14,000 prisoners were blinded and sent to Samuel in groups of a hundred, each group led by a one-eyed man. The ghastly sight of this eyeless army so horrified Samuel that he fainted, and died two days later. Four years after that Basil conquered what was left of Bulgaria, and reduced the Serbs to vassalage; the Empire's frontier in Europe had returned to the Danube. Outside the Balkans, Byzantium conquered the Crimea (1016), Edessa (1032), the Armenian principalities (1022-45), and eastern Sicily (1038-43), while Aleppo and Damascus had to pay tribute. These accomplishments are all the more impressive because they came from a state with harder arteries than its rivals.

Byzantium's good times ended with the death of Basil II. He was succeeded by his brother Constantine VIII, who had shared the throne with Basil during his long reign and had kept himself busy for four decades with what one scornful scribe called "the amusements of the Hippodrome, the table, the chase and games of hazard." Thus the dynasty of Basil I came full circle, producing an emperor who was a lot like the lazy wastrel Basil himself had replaced. Constantine soon died without leaving a male heir, and though the dynasty continued for a few more years, palace intrigues let the world know that the Empire had passed its peak. In 1037 a general named George Maniaces led an expedition that recovered most of Sicily from the Moslems; he brought with him some Norman mercenaries and the celebrated Varangian Guard, led by Harald Hardrada, the future king of Norway. However, he suffered defeat when other Normans invaded the island, and all his gains were lost after he returned to Constantinople, in an unsuccessful revolt against Emperor Constantine IX. As Byzantium squandered what strength it had on palace struggles, new new enemies arose, like the Normans and the Turks, and the tide of Byzantine history turned--for the last time.

The Normans Go to Italy

One of the first to make his mark after Rollo was a minor noble named Tancred d'Hauteville. In Tancred's day the land was peaceful and secure, leaving a surplus of ambitious knights, landless second sons, and other armed malcontents. Three of Tancred's sons, William, Robert and Roger, led this group to southern Italy in 1035. Here the Byzantines and Lombards skirmished constantly, allowing enterprising mercenaries a great opportunity to make a fortune. Individual Normans had been coming to Italy since 1016, usually to get a ride on a ship headed for the Holy Land, but now the three brothers would outdo their predecessors. First William served the Byzantines, in an attempt to recover Sicily from the Moslems (see above). This campaign was a failure, but William came out of it a hero; at the siege of Syracuse he spotted, charged, unhorsed and killed that city's military governor, earning for himself the nickname Bras-de-Fer (Iron Arm). Back in Italy he changed employers, and started working for the Lombards. In 1040 William seized the castle of Melfi, in the no-man's-land between the factions; two years later the Lombards rewarded him with the title Count of Apulia.

The Normans faced a tough going because the pope and the Greek-speaking subjects of Byzantine Italy didn't want the Normans to have land as well as glory. In 1053, despite their serious disagreements (this was the year before the final divorce between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches), Pope Leo IX and Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX agreed to an anti-Norman alliance. The Normans had been fighting among themselves for a bit, but when faced with expulsion from the peninsula, they joined together and struck first. Robert and another Norman adventurer, Richard of Aversa, led the force that met the pope's army and slaughtered it near the city of Civitate. The pope fled to nearby Benevento, but its citizens handed him over to the victors. Now the Normans saw him once again as their spiritual leader, rather than their enemy, so they fell on their knees and begged forgiveness for their deeds. They treated their captive with great courtesy, but held him for nine months, until he agreed to recognize Robert as king of Calabria. Five weeks later, the pope died a broken man.

William Bras-de-Fer had died childless in 1046, so his Apulian land and title went to Robert, now called Robert Guiscard ("Robert the Cunning"). Thus, Robert was now the most powerful man in both the heel and toe of the Italian "boot." In 1060 Robert and Roger began the conquest of Byzantine Italy. This time the pope was on their side; Pope Nicholas II realized that the Normans could be useful if they directed their energy against enemies of the Papacy, especially Byzantium and the Moslems. To encourage them in this direction, he proclaimed that Robert was, "by the Grace of God and Saint Peter, duke of Apulia and Calabria and, with their help, hereafter of Sicily." In return, Robert acknowledged the pope as his feudal overlord. The Hauteville brothers overran the rest of Calabria in a matter of months, and in 1061 they crossed the Messina Strait with 2,000 men. However, a revolt in the recently conquered areas forced Robert to return to the mainland, leaving Roger to subjugate Sicily by himself. The Byzantine port of Bari was nearly impregnable and required a lengthy siege; not until it fell in 1071 could the Normans claim to be the masters of south Italy. In the meantime Gaeta and the principality of Capua had fallen to Richard of Aversa, while Robert finished off the last Lombard states, Benevento and Salerno, in 1077.

William the Conqueror

England paid the second ransom after making Olaf promise that he would become a Christian and stay away for good. Olaf kept his word, but Sveyn was free to make raids of his own; in the early eleveth century he demanded, and got, a total of 60,000 pounds of silver. Nothing else Ethelred tried worked; at one point he even ordered the killing of all Danes in England. This command could not be carried out, because those Danes who had been left behind when Ethelred's ancestors overran the Danelaw were now assimilated into the English population; in fact, many people in present-day northern England can claim Scandinavian ancestry, if they care to. In 1013 Sveyn came back, this time with plans to conquer England and stay. After a few months of fighting, Ethelred fled to Normandy. Sveyn died shortly after that, and a two-year war followed, in which Sveyn's son, Canute (also spelled Cnut), triumphed against both Ethelred and his son, Edmund II. As a result, from 1018 to 1035 Canute ruled both Denmark and England, and took tribute from Scotland; in 1028 he conquered Norway, too. He was one of England's best kings, and did well because he kept himself popular among the English, knowing that he didn't have the resources to hold his empire together by force.⁽²⁾ This is shown in the fact that only seven years after his death, his sons lost control of England, and a pious son of Ethelred, Edward the Confessor, returned and took the crown.

In Normandy, the descendants of Rollo the Viking enlarged and strengthened their fief skillfully, for more than a hundred years. Then in 1035 a dynastic crisis undid much of their work. The heirless Duke Robert made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and died on the way back. He had no legitimate children, but he had an illegitimate son named William; Robert had decreed that William would become his successor should he not return. But William the Bastard was a child, so he had to fight doubly hard to keep the crown which now passed to him. Like Otto the Great and Pepin the Short, he found in the Church the ally he needed. He won the enthusiastic support of the clergy by promoting reforms and building new churches and monasteries, and in return they raised a body of knights and footsoldiers, to beat down the unruly vassals and man the castles located on strategic points throughout Normandy.

It took two decades for William to complete the job. Because he had worked so hard to build up his army, William would not let it wither away when he finally had peace in the realm. The question was, when and where would he use it? The answer came in 1066, when Edward the Confessor died heirless. At once three rivals arose with claims to the English throne. One of them was William, who was related to Edward; in fact, Edward had named William as his heir in 1051. Another was Norway's Harald Hardrada, successor to Canute's broken kingdom. A seven-foot-tall giant with a fearsome reputation, Hardrada didn't try to act like a civilized Scandinavian king, prefering to be the last of the old-fashioned Vikings that had dominated the scene in the previous chapter. The Anglo-Saxon forerunner to Parliament, the Witan, passed over both and elected one of its own, Harold Godwinson. They crowned Harold in the church Edward had built, Westminster Abbey, only hours after the dead king had been buried there.

One Anglo-Saxon noble who disagreed with this decision was Harold's own brother, Tostig, the earl of Northumbria. He had a falling-out with Harold a year earlier, when his subjects revolted and ran him off his land, and Harold did not help him. Elsewhere in this narrative we see nobles become disloyal when they don't get their way, and in this case Tostig contacted Hardrada, asking him if he was still interested in staking his claim to England.

Meanwhile to the south, William began to earn the title of "the Conqueror" around the town of St. Valery, on the French coast of the English Channel. Here in September he assembled seven hundred ships and 7,000 men. With the army came many of the men who would take over key positions in the church and government of England, feudalize the nation from top to bottom, and make it a more efficient state. On September 27, the tide and winds turned in the invaders' favor, and they set sail for England.

Those winds helped to decide the outcome of this three-sided struggle. The steady north wind that delayed William's crossing of the Channel allowed Harald Hardrada to make the first move. The Norse crossed the North Sea with 200 longships and 1,800 men, landed in northeast England, burned the town of Scarborough, and advanced on York. King Harold immediately mobilized his forces and marched north, covering a staggering 180 miles in four days before he reached the invaders. The Vikings were at Stamford Bridge, expecting to meet negotiators who would discuss the surrender of York, so they were caught by surprise; many of them weren't wearing their armor when attacked. It was a massacre, but not a quick one; these were Vikings after all, and they fought back fiercely all day before Harold and his men finally prevailed.⁽³⁾ Hardrada and Tostig were both slain, and Harold kept a promise he had made earlier in the day--he would only give the Norse king enough land for a burial plot. However, this also meant that nobody was minding the Channel; William made his crossing and landed at Pevensey without losing a single man.

Harold heard about the Norman landing quickly enough, and led his men back to the south in a series of forced marches. They arrived in Sussex on the night of October 13. The two armies were almost evenly matched; each side had 7,000 men, of which 2,000 were elite warriors in chainmail. The other five thousand in each army were an assortment of archers and footsoldiers. The Anglo-Saxons wore long hair and mustaches, but the Normans cut their hair so short that many people in Sussex thought an army of monks had invaded them. The most important difference was that the Normans had more horses, and that they had learned to fight on horseback, like French knights, while the English preferred to fight Viking-style (on foot).

The battle of Hastings (October 14, 1066) began with Harold and his men holding a hill. Because they were on their home ground, in a good defensive position, Harold's advisors recommended avoiding a direct conflict until the men plundered the surrounding countryside, thereby keeping fresh supplies from the invaders; in a long war, they reasoned, the Normans could only get weaker. Harold proudly refused to do this, and both he and William--each for their own reasons--decided to fight immediately. William divided his force into three divisions (Bretons on the left, Normans in the center, and French and Flemish on the right); Harold chose a phalanx formation, with a shield wall in front, and his men arranged ten ranks deep. For most of the day William was unable to break through this shield wall; in fact his army nearly panicked when a false rumor spread that William had been slain already. Then William got the idea of having his knights stage a mock retreat, and the English pursued them to the low ground. That was the decisive moment of the battle; on the plain the Norman knights had the mobility advantage, and were able to break up and isolate the English units. William got his bowmen to help by ordering them to arch their shots, so that the arrows fell on their targets from above, instead of harmlessly hitting the Saxon shields. Harold perished, and with him went Anglo-Saxon England. Today's Britons remember 1066 as the most important date of their history, for it was the last time anyone successfully invaded their island. Before 1066 England was one of the most backward countries in Europe; thanks to William's reforms after the conquest, it has been one of Europe's most advanced nations since that time.

For William the most dangerous part of the conquest ended with the battle of Hastings, but another five years were required to bring all of England under his authority. First he captured the ports along England's southeast coast, allowing reinforcements to come in. Then he surrounded and isolated London, because that city was too big to take in a single charge. In late December the local earls and the archbishops of Canterbury and York surrendered the kingdom, allowing William to be crowned. In truth, however, he still only had the southeast quarter of England. The most serious challenge came from the northeast, where the people were still largely ethnic Scandinavians and some Danish invaders landed there, using the war as an excuse to do some pillaging. Once William beat them back, he retaliated savagely; the land of the northern rebels was so devastated that it did not recover until the twelfth century. Then King Malcolm of Scotland tried his luck by invading the northernmost counties, getting as far as Jarrow before William arrived and forced him to acknowledge his supremacy in England (1070-72).

After the fighting ended, William chose to spend most of the years remaining to him in his native Normandy, leaving his administrators (mostly clergymen, of course) behind to run the day-to-day affairs of the new territory. However, he did not get to enjoy a quiet reign. He had to return to England in 1075 to put down a revolt, led by the earls of Hereford and Norfolk, and once more in 1085 to deal with a final Danish invasion. On top of that, his eldest son, Robert, staged some uprisings because he resented his father's refusal to let him take an active part in running Normandy (the Norman homeland had technically been handed over to him in 1066). This was a serious enough threat that William shipped units of the English militia, called the Fyrd, to France to fight alongside the loyalist barons and knights.

The Norman Kingdoms

The small size of these kingdoms made it easy for the king to personally oversee many day-to-day functions. They did not strain the simple communications of the times, and showed that, on a small scale at least, the new method of government was both economical and efficient. As the national income of the West continued to rise and money became a common part of everyday life, the defiencies of feudalism became more obvious. It became harder to bear with the personal eccentricities of each baron, count and duke, to deal with problems it was too inflexible to handle, and to counter its basic lawlessness. The merchants and the peasants found an ally in the king, who, by hairsplitting insistence on his feudal rights and by reviving decayed precedent, could either cut down the power of the insubordinate landholders or drive them to a revolt in which they could be destroyed. Royal propaganda encouraged loyalty to one's nation first and loyalty to one's lord second; that appealed to the memory of Roman greatness and Roman government by law. But even at the end of the Middle Ages the size of the area that could be governed in such a way was strictly limited. France corresponded to the maximum. The German (Holy Roman) Empire was well above it and ultimately the centrifugal forces of the landholders split it into a puzzle of big and little fiefs whose histories of devouring and dividing went on until the mid-nineteenth century.

It was in William's England that the first modern-style nation-state came into being, one with a centralized administration that ran the kingdom by law rather than by custom. William began the transformation by demanding an oath of fealty from every Anglo-Saxon lord; those who refused had their lands confiscated. Then William divided those landholdings into fiefs small enough to discourage future opposition, and gave them to the Norman knights who crossed the Channel with him. On the western frontier he inherited a problem with the Welsh (Harold had fought a war with Gruffydd ap Llewellyn, king of Gwynedd, from 1062 to 1064), and though the Normans invaded Wales in 1068 and 1100, they never succeeded in conquering more than a third of the region. In the end William allowed three Welsh kingdoms to remain (Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth), and granted extensive powers to the nobles on the border, making them "lords of the marches," to keep the Welsh from raiding England.

To control the local clergy, he appointed Lanfranc, an Italian cleric and scholar, as Archbishop of Canterbury; despite his nationality, Lanfranc cooperated with William in keeping the English church independent of the pope. And though William allowed the existing shires (counties) to run local affairs the way they had done in Anglo-Saxon times, he set over them a central administrative council called the Curia Regis (King's Council), made his vassals and bishops members of it, and used it to carry out his decrees, keep the country's accounts and resolve any dispute that concerned the crown.

On a midwinter day in 1085, William donned his crown and called the court to a solemn assembly in which he announced that, for purposes of taxation, he would hold an inquest of all England. During the following year the king's barons, legates and justices traveled all across the kingdom to learn the extent and value of every estate in the country; they were also on the lookout for any Norman nobles who had occupied lands reserved for the king. Wherever they went sheriffs and other local authorities came forth to answer the questions of the visitors and to testify that everything they recorded was true. As one medieval chronicler put it, "So minutely did [William] cause the survey to be made, that there was not one hide nor yard of land, nor even . . . was there an ox, cow, or swine that was not set down in the writ."

Scribes organized the gathered data, and eventually put it all into two bulky volumes, called the Domesday (Doomsday) Book because they thought it would be the last word on census-taking. Copies still exist today, and it serves as an invaluable source of information about late 11th-century England, one that is complete almost to the last animal.

William did not see the Domesday Book in its final form. While the king rode through the burning ruins of Mantes, a French town he had attacked, his horse stepped on a burning ember and threw him against the pommel of his saddle. He died of the resulting internal injuries in September 1087.

William's court planned to bury him in St. Stephen's, an abbey he had built in the Norman town of Caen. But the funeral service was interrupted by a certain Ascelin, who laid claim to the church because William had taken from him by force the land it was built on. An inquiry was conducted, and sure enough, the land did belong to Ascelin. Since Ascelin would not allow the Conqueror to be buried on his property, the clergy purchased the land so it could proceed with William's funeral.

"All marveled," wrote Master Wace the chronicler, "that this great king, who had conquered so much and won so many cities and so many fine castles, could not call so much land as his body might lie in after his death."

William had three sons to divide the inheritance. The eldest, Robert, became Duke of Normandy. He also wanted England, but was more interested in eating than in fighting; one contemporary observer described him with these words: "Belching from daily excess, he came hiccuping to war." England went to the ruddy and obnoxious second son, William II (also called William Rufus). The third son, Henry I (also called Henry Beauclerc), got two and a half tons of silver and had all the bad qualities of his brothers.

When Lanfranc died in 1089, William II had all churches celebrate, and waited two years to appoint a successor, collecting the archbishop's salary in the meantime. In 1091 he invaded Normandy and took Robert's land, but before the year was up, illness forced him to return to England. William got a second chance in 1096, when Robert went on the First Crusade and sold Normandy to raise funds for the expedition. However, William then died in a hunting accident (1100), so the whole kingdom went by default to the landless brother, Henry I, who seized the royal treasury and had himself crowned king at Westminster. To unite the Saxon, Scottish and Norman royal families, Henry married Matilda of Scotland, the daughter of Scotland's King Malcolm II and his Anglo-Saxon queen Margaret. Henry might have enjoyed a peaceful reign if Robert never came back from the crusade, but in 1101 Robert returned and staged an unsuccessful invasion of England. Five years later Henry struck back; at the battle of Tinchebray in France (1106), Robert was defeated and exiled to Wales; now Normandy and Calais became permanent parts of Henry's domain.

Henry I's greatest accomplishment was the development of the Curia Regis into two separate bodies: one to handle judicial matters, the other financial ones. Henry sent members of the judicial branch across the land to try disputes where they arose, rather than bring them to the king's court; these were the forerunners to the circuit judges of toaday. The financial branch arose because most of the barons knew little about money, were bored or baffled by record-keeping and math, and stayed away when there was paperwork to be done. Those who stayed and got the work done became a corps of professional accountants. At first they did their tallying on a checkered tablecloth, and from that we get the name of the Exchequer, England's royal treasury. To hire more competent accountants the king stopped looking for men from noble families and took whoever had the training, irregardless of their background. He paid them with coins, instead of the usual grants of land, and thus was born the first civil service the West had seen since the fall of Rome.

In Italy, Robert Guiscard went to help his brother in Sicily, once the Byzantines had been driven from the mainland. Together Robert and Roger captured Palermo, the Sicilian capital, in 1071. Then Robert got another idea to match his ambitions--could he take Constantinople itself? He decided to try it; in 1081 he crossed the Adriatic with an army, captured Corfu and the Albanian port of Durazzo, and defeated a Byzantine force led by the emperor. Before he could proceed to the imperial capital, though, Byzantine agents launched more revolts in Apulia, forcing the Normans to go home. In 1085 Robert made one more attempt to march east, only to fall victim to the same typhoid epidemic that killed many of his men.

Robert's son, Roger Borsa, inherited Calabria and Apulia, while Robert's brother Roger became duke of Sicily. Sicily was still a Moslem emirate, so it took a long time for Roger to secure his inheritance; he took Syracuse in 1086, and Malta in 1090. Finally in 1091 he eliminated the last Moslem opposition. Once he finished, he proved to be the most diplomatic member of his family. Recognizing that he needed religious tolerance to keep his state together, he made Arabic one of the official languages of his court, left some Moslem governors in their posts, and allowed Islamic courts to remain in session. Thus Roger became known as the Great Count, one of the wisest rulers in Europe; French, German and Hungarian kings all wanted a political marriage with his family. This is all the more amazing because Robert Guiscard's eldest son, Count Bohemond, was a leader in exactly the opposite type of enterprise--the First Crusade. Bohemond captured the city of Antioch in 1098, founding a Crusader state that would last for 170 years.

Roger died in 1101. He was succeeded first by a son named Simon, then by another son named Roger II (1105-54). His reign saw the consolidation of Norman power in south Italy. He took Calabria in 1122, and when William II, the son of Roger Borsa, died in 1127, Roger II annexed Apulia; three years later he proclaimed himself a king. Then he and captured the rival Norman state of Gaeta (1137), and finished by taking the independent cities of Amalfi (1137) and Naples (1139). In 1146 he even crossed the sea and captured Tripoli, establishing the only Norman colony in Africa. His court at Palermo, with its black servants, Saracen guards, harem and pleasure-domes, became the scandal and envy of Christendom.

Thus, by the mid-twelfth century the Normans had gained for themselves a widely scattered empire, in England, Italy and Syria. As the best knights in Europe, they excelled in fighting and castle-building. However, their main role was to be the catalysts of medieval culture. They invented almost nothing on their own, but instead learned architecture, tactics and the techniques of government from others. Once they had improved on all of these things, and changed the face of Europe, they faded away. By 1200 they were no longer a distinct people, and their kingdoms were in the hands of their former students.

The Papal Investiture Controversy

During its period as a united state, the Holy Roman Empire had three dynasties ruling it: the Saxons (962-1024), the Salians (1024-1125), and the Hohenstaufens (1125-1250). As we saw in the previous chapter, the Saxon emperors spent their time driving back the Viking and Magyar invaders, and showing their rowdy dukes who was boss.

The Salians came from the central duchy of Franconia. Their first emperor, Conrad II (1024-39), was a distant relative of the Saxons, descended from Henry the Fowler, but not from the emperors who followed him. He conquered Burgundy in 1033, so the Imperium was sometimes called a trias, or tripartite state, afterwards (Germany + Italy + Burgundy). Conrad also took the offensive against the barbarians, beginning a drive to the east called the drang nach osten. During the Dark Ages, the Elbe River had marked the eastern limit of the Germans. The lands between the Elbe and the Oder, modern East Germany, were populated by still-pagan Slavic tribes, like the Sorbs and the Wends; Poland conquered the southern part of this area (Lusatia and Milzen) in the first years of the eleventh century. Conrad retook Lusatia and Milzen in 1031; his only setbacks were the surrender of his northernmost province, the March of Schleswig, to Denmark's Canute the Great (1025), and a border adjustment in Hungary's favor (1031). Henceforth the Germans would look east for living space, and the drang nach osten would be a key element of German foreign policy until their total defeat in World War II.

Charlemagne and the Holy Roman emperors were quite aware that their nation would die with them unless the conqueror became an administrator. Most medieval kings hired clerics to do administrative work, because these were the best-educated folks they could find, but the Germans did more than that; they made barons out of the bishops. When Emperor Otto II led an army into Italy in 981, 70 percent of the soldiers came from clerical vassals. In the Empire, church and state acted as one.

At the same time the emperors encouraged reform in the German Church, for the Cluniacs had shown how such a movement could make people more law-abiding. Soon the emperor and his bishops were cooperating in raising the nation from savagery, rekindling the piety of brutalized clerics, and deploring the frequent breaking of their vows. Respect for peace grew with the success of this repair, and the bishops became pillars of the new order.

The Papacy took longer to recover than the rest of the Church did. It hit bottom in 1033, when the Tuscans, a family of Italian nobles, elected a twelve-year-old to serve as pope. This pope, Benedict IX, built up an incredible track record of sin, which included bisexuality, bestiality, witchcraft and Satanism. He was so bad, in fact, that in 1044 the Crescenzio family, rivals of the Tuscans, drove him out and set up their own pope, Sylvester III. However, in the following year Benedict returned to Rome and took back his office. Before the year was over he grew tired of being pope and sold the title to his godfather, who now became Pope Gregory VI, for a thousand pounds of silver. This shameful transaction caused such an outcry that Benedict changed his mind and refused to surrender the job he had just sold. Sylvester and Gregory would not step down either, so now there were three popes.

It was the current German emperor, Henry III, who rescued the Papacy from this mess. In 1046, at the urging of the Cluniacs, he called for a synod which declared both Sylvester III and Gregory VI removed from office; a second synod deposed Benedict IX. He went on to appoint the next three popes, each time choosing a German clergyman who was both competent and pious. The third of these popes, Leo IX (1049-54), reorganized the College of Cardinals. Previously all the cardinals had been Romans, representing the corrupt ruling families of central Italy, so Leo replaced them with Cluniacs from anywhere in western Europe, thereby surrounding himself with advisors who were more trustworthy and favored reform. Then he worked to cleanse the Church of evils like simony and clerical marriage.

Unfortunately, the good relationship between the emperor and the pope cooled in the mid-eleventh century. Again they disagreed on the issue of who was Christendom's supreme leader. This had been brought up in the ninth century, but then both Empire and Papacy collapsed before they could fight over the matter. The emperor felt he had to be in charge, because the imperial crown declared him to be Christendom's champion in western Europe, though in reality the Empire was never much more than a state for Germans run by Germans. And because the Church saw itself as an international organization, it could not tie itself to any secular authority. Previously, Papal leadership had tended to be passive, acting as the ultimate court of appeal for Church matters, but making no move unless appealed to; Gregory the Great (590-604) was the classic exception to this rule. Now came several aggressive popes; under them Rome actively interfered in politics, no longer passing up any opportunity to increase the power/authority of the Church.

The first phase of this incredibly rapid rejuvenation was an 1059 decree ending lay investiture--no layman, not even a king, would be allowed to appoint bishops or popes anymore. By limiting voting rights to the cardinals, the Papacy kept its elections from being hijacked by the Roman mob. However, it also denied the Holy Roman Emperor any say in the matter, making the pope independent of the state. The author of this decree was Hildebrand, a Tuscan prelate, and he also promoted the idea that a true priest should not marry, but give his affections and loyalty to the Church alone, unencumbered by duties to either family or country. Hildebrand got away with this because Emperor Henry IV was a minor. Lack of opposition encouraged him and the current pope to try something more daring--why stop at making the Church free from state control when it could become a Church that controlled the state?

Hildebrand became Pope Gregory VII in 1073. At his first council a year later he made celibacy mandatory, forcing married priests to get divorces (many ex-wives, now abandoned and broke, subsequently committed suicide). Then he made his views on investiture the official position of the Church; to promote this, he re-publicized The Donation of Constantine (See Chapter 7). This was a claim over the whole Empire, making conflict inevitable. He had one advantage to offset his lack of an army: the Empire's government couldn't run without the German Church. If the emperor was deprived of any say in the appointment of bishops and if their allegiance was to the Papacy alone, the secular power would wither and become merely the ornament of a theocracy, with clergymen immune from taxes, laws, and all other secular obligations.

Henry IV denounced Papal imperialism when he grew up. Simony suited him fine, and he detested papal interference in the selection of those he called "his" bishops. The first round of the contest began when Henry declared Gregory VII deposed ("no longer pope, but false monk" was how he put it in a letter to a group of German bishops). The pope responded by deposing the emperor's bishops, and then by excommunicating the emperor. This was a powerful punishment, for the princes and dukes of the Empire were only inclined to support the emperor when it suited their own interests; the pope's declaration of the emperor as an enemy of the Church was a call to give the crown to somebody else. The result was a resounding Papal victory, with the emperor doing public penance, standing barefoot in the snow, wearing the garb of a humble pilgrim, for three days at the doorstep of the fortress of Canossa, waiting for the pope to let him in and forgive him (1077). Gregory kept him waiting because this was completely unexpected--he thought Henry was coming with an army--until the owner of the castle, the Countess Matilda (who also happened to be the pope's current mistress), and Hugh, the abbot of Cluny, persuaded him to pardon the contrite ruler. Ever since that time the phrase "going to Canossa" has signified total humiliation.

Henry knuckled under to the pope because the nobles of Germany had already elected an emperor of their own, Rudolf of Swabia, the first of the famous Hapsburg monarchs. Once the pope revoked the excommunication Henry went home to crush the revolt; then he took back his concessions to the Papacy, declared the pope deposed again, and carried his own candidate, the "anti-pope" Clement III, to Rome by force of arms. The real pope was surrounded in Castel Sant' Angelo (Hadrian's mausoleum, see Chapter 6, footnote #21), and he called on Robert Guiscard, who had just returned from his unsuccessful march on Constantinople, to save him. The Normans drove Henry from Rome, reducing a third of the city to ashes in the process, but because Gregory was very unpopular with the Romans, Robert took him to Monte Cassino.⁽⁴⁾ There he died in 1085; Gregory's final words were, "I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile."

The struggle went on for half a century, for the imperial army was too often needed elsewhere to keep a permanent garrison in Rome. The emperor couldn't afford to give way on either the leadership or the investiture issues, because the German bishops were the pillars of the Empire. The popes, swept up by Gregory VII's intoxicating ideas, found it difficult to compromise even on secular matters. The emperors regularly invaded Italy, to place their candidates on the throne of St. Peter, and the Romans just as regularly threw them out and invited the real popes back after the emperors went home. The rival emperors crowned by the popes likewise didn't last any longer than the real emperor's "anti-popes"; all they did was cause confusion. Most Europeans chose to acknowledge the emperor but not his puppet pope, and the pope but not his puppet emperor. Finally in 1122 Henry V (Henry IV's son), and Pope Callistus II reached a compromise; frightened by the growing lawlessness their civil war was causing, they agreed to abandon their puppets and to allow the emperor to approve the pope's appointment of the bishops before they took office. It was an uneasy peace, though, and in the long struggle of the northern Italian towns for independence, the pope found willing allies against the emperor. Because they were princes in their own right, and usually Italian, the popes had a knee-jerk reaction against a power that was secular, imperial, and foreign to the peninsula. Moreover, the Empire was weakening, even on the north side of the Alps, so the popes found that their opponent was a groggy giant. They probably knew that allowing the disintegration of the Empire could expose the Papacy to harsher winds (it happened when they broke with Constantinople a few centuries earlier), but every pope who rocked its creaking structure came out looking like an Italian patriot.

El Cid and the Reconquest

This was too much for the caliph's Berber mercenaries, who revolted. Hisham abdicated in 1009, and two distant relatives, Muhammad II Mahdi (Hisham's choice) and Sulayman al-Mustain (the Berbers' candidate), fought for the throne; Sanjul was murdered in the same year. With some help from Count Sancho Garces of Castile, the Berbers defeated the "Arabs," looted Cordova and installed Sulayman as caliph. Muhammad made a comeback, though; he allied himself with Barcelona's Count Ramon Borrell I, and in 1010 a second Christian-Moslem army marched on Cordova. This time the city was burned down; Abd-al-Rahman's great palace was sacked and destroyed, barely fifty years after its completion. Before the year was over, Muhammad was assassinated, and Hisham returned to rule a second time. But not for long; he was forced to abdicate again in 1013. Next Sulayman got to rule for three more years, and in the increasing chaos, the throne changed hands several times between the Umayyad and Hammudid families. Meanwhile the governors of cities like Seville, Granada, Badajoz, Valencia, Toledo, and Saragossa declared independence from what they saw as the Cordova dictatorship. In 1031 the last Ummayad, Hisham III, stepped down, and the caliphate was no more.

Twenty petty emirs of "Arab" and Berber ancestry now divided Moslem Spain between themselves; today we call them the Reyes de Taifas ("party kings"). They avoided Christian conquest simply because the Christians were almost as divided as they were. The overall picture becomes very difficult to follow, with Christians serving as mercenaries in Moslem armies, Christian-Moslem alliances, Christians fighting Christians, Moslems fighting Moslems, and occasionally a proper Christian-Moslem war. It's not much clearer in the Christian states, where by 1000 the royal families of Leon, Castile and Navarre were united by marriage, with simultaneous or alternating reigns of rival cousins or in-laws. Eventually Navarre's greatest ruler, Sancho III (1000-35), rose to the top; when he died, his kingdom was split between three sons: Garcia IV in Navarre, Ramiro I in Aragon, and Ferdinand I in Castile.⁽⁵⁾. As a result, every Christian king in Spain since 1037 has been a descendant of Sancho III.

In the increasing chaos, a Jew rose to command the army of one of the Moslem states, something that would have been unthinkable in other times. This was Samuel ibn Naghrela (993-1056), who fled Cordova when the Berbers took the city in 1013. For a while he ran a spice shop in Malaga, but eventually he moved to Granada, where he was first tax collector, then a secretary, and finally an assistant vizier to the Berber king Habbus al-Muzaffar. When Habbus died in 1038, Naghrela made sure that his son Badis succeeded him. In return, Badis made Naghrela his vizier and top general, two posts which he held for the next seventeen years. Naghrela's son Joseph inherited those jobs, but apparently it went to his head (he was only twenty years old), for he was arrogant as well as talented. Moslems accused Joseph of using his office to benefit Jewish friends, assassinated him, and launched a massacre of Granada's Jews the next day (December 31, 1066). Today's Jews remember 1066 for this, rather than for the Norman conquest of England; it was one of the first signs that the good times they enjoyed in Moslem Spain weren't going to last.

It is at this point that the most famous figure of the Reconquest enters the picture. His name was Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, but he is better known as El Cid, after the Arabic Sayyid, meaning lord. Born to a poor noble in 1043, he was given the customary education of a warrior, and sent to King Ferdinand I of Castile and Leon to complete his knightly training. Then like all good knights, he went looking for acts of bravery and charity to perform. According to one story he helped a ragged leper on the road to Leon who turned out to be Saint Lazarus in disguise; Lazarus promised Rodrigo that in return for his charity he would win a great victory after his death.

About the same time Ferdinand I died (1065), and his realm, like that of his father, was divided three ways, with a son getting each piece: Sancho the Strong of Castile, Alfonso of Leon, and Garcia of Galicia. Rodrigo found himself commander of the army belonging to Sancho, who wanted to conquer the inheritance of his brother Alfonso. Instead, Alfonso struck first; he deposed Garcia, had Sancho murdered and proclaimed himself King Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon. As one might expect, the new king did not care to have henchmen of the late Sancho around, so he exiled Rodrigo and three hundred of his followers from the kingdom in 1079.

Rodrigo and his knights spent the next few years as soldiers of fortune, hiring themselves out to any Moslem ruler who would pay them for their services. Meanwhile Aragon annexed Navarre in 1076, so in just a decade the number of Christian kingdoms in Spain was reduced from six to three (Castile-Leon, Aragon and Barcelona). One third of the Iberian peninsula was now in Christian hands, and as the confidence of the Christians grew, that of the Moors shrank. Resuming the Reconquista, Alfonso pushed south, captured Toledo, the former Visigoth capital (1085), and kept advancing until he was only three miles from Granada. In desperation the strongest remaining Moslem ruler, Mohammed al-Mutamid of Seville, called to North Africa for help. Help came from a group of Moslem fundamentalists who had recently conquered Mauretania, Mali and Morocco; they called themselves al-Murabitun ("the Guardians"), a name which Europeans later corrupted to Almoravids. These wild men of the deep Sahara made the Arabs and Berbers of Spain look tame by comparison, and al-Mutamid probably expected them to stay and rule everything once they took care of the Christians; as he explained it, "I would rather be a camel driver in Africa than a swineherd in Castile."

The Almoravid leader, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, invaded Spain with a Berber army and destroyed Alfonso's army at the battle of Sagrajas in 1086; Alfonso and a handful of his men barely escaped with their lives. Many Christians declared that if El Cid had been fighting on Alfonso's side the outcome would have been different, so the humbled king invited El Cid to return from exile. Meanwhile, ibn Tashfin went back to Morocco with most of his army (which was a great relief to the Spanish Moslems!), leaving behind three thousand of his dreaded "Holy Ones" to support the king of Seville. Perhaps because of this, Alfonso recovered his pride, and in 1089 he banished El Cid again.

Once again a mercenary, El Cid went southeast, and in various campaigns he defeated Moslem princes, the count of Barcelona and the king of Aragon; finally he became master of the Moslem city of Valencia (1096). While he was doing that, Alfonso resumed his attack on the Moors. Again the Moors called on the Holy Ones for aid, and ibn Tashfin brought another army to Spain. What was different was that this time the Almoravids came to stay; they easily brushed aside the Christians and conquered all but four of the Moslem states--one of which was El Cid's Valencia.

On July 10, 1099, El Cid died peacefully in bed. Since he had been the only one who could resist the Almoravids, many expected Valencia to fall shortly, and the Holy Ones took no prisoners. The only sensible thing the people of Valencia could do was escape before the Almoravids broke through the city walls. According to legend, El Cid's wife came up with a way to do that. She ordered her husband's dead body dressed in armor and mounted on his horse, so it could lead a charge from the city. The corpse stayed upright in the saddle because it was stiff from rigor mortis, and when the Holy Ones saw the sally led by a man they thought was dead, they fled in terror. Thus the prophecy of Lazarus was fulfilled.⁽⁶⁾

The Almoravid arrival delayed the end of al-Andalus for four hundred years. By 1115 they had subdued the last of the other Moslem states, but then the newcomers succumbed to the luxury of life in Spain. In 1093 Henry, the son of the duke of Burgundy, came to the aid of Alfonso VI against a Moorish invasion; Alfonso rewarded him by making him count of Portucale (modern Oporto), Leon's westernmost province. When Alfonso was succeded by a daughter, Urraca, in 1109, Count Henry, and later his widow, Teresa, renounced their feudal allegiance to León. Then Henry invaded León, but all he accomplished was the securing of Portugal's independence. In 1139 Henry's son, Alfonso Henriques, declared himself the first king of Portugal, Alfonso I. Four years later, through the Treaty of Zamora, King Alfonso VII of León recognized Portugal as an independent kingdom, and so did the pope in 1179. In 1147 some Norman adventurers on their way to the Second Crusade captured Lisbon for the Portuguese; this advanced Portugal's southern frontier to the Tagus River.

Likewise, the rest of Christian Spain remained divided for some time to come. Ramon Berenguer III, the count of Barcelona, acquired Provence (the eastern half of the Riviera) from Burgundy by marrying its heiress in 1112. Navarre conquered Saragossa from the Almoravids in 1118, but then Navarre and Aragon were split between two heirs of Navarre's Alfonso I in 1134. A more permanent union came with the marriage of Barcelona's Ramon Berenguer IV with Queen Petronilla of Aragon in 1137, and later Ramon Berenguer pushed southward a bit, clearing the lower Ebro valley of Moors (1148-49). His son Alfonso II (1162-96) added some fiefs on the French side of the Pyrenees--Roussillon, Montpellier (1204), Foix, Nîmes, and Béziers--but this would have the drawback of drawing his son, Peter II, into the Albigensian Crusade (see below). To the west, Castile and Leon split again in 1157, this time between two sons of Alfonso VII; the Christian kingdoms apparently considered their independence as important as winning the Reconquista.

The empire of the Almoravids collapsed in 1145. They were replaced by a group of puritans called the Almohads (from the Arabic al-Muwahidin, meaning "those who proclaim the unity of God"). Under them the Reconquista took a turn for the worse. The fanatical Almohads harshly persecuted their Christian and Jewish subjects, killing many and either expelling the rest or converting them at sword point. In doing so they destroyed what had made Moslem Spain a prosperous state. Previously wars had seldom been total ones; Christians and Moslems often served in the same army, and while Moslems behaved frightfully when they captured towns containing Christians, they didn't bother their Christian subjects back home. Many Christians, and even more Jews, had risen to important positions of authority under Moslem rulers; today Jews still look back on Spain in the 8th-12th centuries as a "golden age." Christian intolerance grew to match Moslem bigotry. Many of the characteristics which marked Spaniards afterwards--melancholy temperament, black humor, lack of tolerance for non-Catholics--can be traced to the brutal nature of the religious wars that followed.

Despite Almohad efforts to clean house at home, the initiative on the Iberian peninsula remained with the Christians. In 1212 Castile won a crushing victory over the Almohads at the battle of Los Navas de Tolosa, and the heartland of Spain passed into Castilian hands. Like the Almoravids before them, the Almohads treated Spain as part of a mainly African empire; when support from Africa stopped coming, their strength in Spain withered away. James II of Aragon (1213-76) seized the Balearic Islands in 1229-35, and Valencia in 1238. A royal marriage in 1230 reunited Castile and Leon for good, under Ferdinand III (1217-52, also called Ferdinand the Saint). He went on to capture Cordova in 1236, turned Cordova's great Mosque into a church, and seized Seville (the Moslem capital since 1170) in 1248. Portugal's King Alfonso III (1248-79) gave Portugal its present-day frontiers by clearing the Moors out of Algarve, his southernmost province, and moved his capital from Coimbra to Lisbon. Navarre, however, dropped out of the Reconquista, because the daughter of King Sancho VII married a French noble, the duke of Champagne, so after 1234 the Basques were more interested in what was happening north of the Pyrenees; we won't hear from them again until Chapter 10 of this work. As for the Moors, all that was left to them was a 200-mile-long strip of land in the southeast called the Emirate of Granada, famous for its glorious palace, the Alhambra.

Byzantium Under Siege Again

Converted to Islam in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Turks had a zeal for conquest which no longer existed among the Arabs. Up to this point they had not been seen away from their Central Asian home, except as slaves or employees of somebody else. Now they formed powerful military states of their own, and one of them, the Seljuk Sultanate, grew phenomenally fast. In the 1040s the Seljuk Turks conquered Iran, in 1055 Iraq. Then came Turkish raids in Armenia, which prompted an imperial response; Emperor Romanus IV led an army to punish the Turks. The result, the battle of Manzikert (1071), was a disaster. It left the whole eastern half of the empire defenseless, and soon Turkish tribes moved in to settle it. They only stopped when they reached the Bosporus, because they lacked a navy. Today we remember Manzikert as the battle that turned Asia Minor into Turkey.

About the same time, the Empire's commerce came under outside control. The seemingly endless wealth of Constantinople had tempted many Westerners; Italian and Jewish merchants had brought to western Europe exquisite Byzantine brocades, cups, miniatures, reliquaries, and other magnificent works covered with gold, enamel or gems. The most dangerous of those tempted was Robert Guiscard, an energetic Norman leader. We saw previously how he had conquered all Byzantine territory in southern Italy; now he set his sights on Constantinople. At this time the Byzantine throne was occupied by Alexius I (1081-1118), the cleverest politician of the day, and because of the weakness of his army and navy, Alexius sought help from Venice. Venetian help came with strings attached, though; this allowed the merchants of Venice to make deeper inroads into the Empire. State legislation ordering low interest rates for agricultural reasons discouraged the Byzantines from competing in a high-risk business such as long-distance trading, and the ever-needy treasury of the emperor bore down heavily on all Byzantine merchants. Crushed by the overhead of their empire, the Byzantines could not even outperform the Venetians when trading with Greece, and a Venetian network began to replace the Byzantine one. In 1081 the Venetians won the right to trade anywhere within the Empire's boundaries without restriction or taxation of any kind. With such a mortgage, any prosperity seen in the Byzantine Empire was largely an illusion.

Anyway, the Venetian fleet proved useful, but the timely death of Guiscard was what really stopped the Norman invasion. Then Alexius called on the West for help against the Turks, and this caused a sequence of events that led to the First Crusade. In 1095 Pope Urban II spoke in a council at Clermont, France, and exhorted the knights of the West to put aside their vile quarrels and go east to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel. When the Crusaders arrived, the Byzantine emperor had mixed feelings about them. No doubt he was glad to see that his appeal got an answer, but all he expected were some additional mercenaries for his army. Instead it now looked like the entire barbarian West was converging on New Rome, and the Crusaders' blend of ignorance and fanaticism made them dangerous allies. Alexius used their staggered arrival to his advantage: he kept them divided and dependent on the Empire for supplies, and made each group of Crusaders swear loyalty to Alexius and promise to return to Byzantium any territory they conquered that lay within the pre-Manzikert Imperial frontier. Then he excused himself from the conflict he was sending the Crusaders to fight in. The Crusaders found this behavior most unchivalrous, since it meant they were under the authority of a man who refused to lead them. They did not think too kindly of their supposed ally after this. At first they kept their part of the bargain, and handed over to Alexius the part of Turkey they marched through, but the hardships they endured on the march were so bad that the emperor eventually withdrew all support, thinking that the Crusade was a lost cause. Those Crusaders who went on to take Edessa, Antioch and Jerusalem saw this as a betrayal, and never gave any more territory to Byzantium. Alexius, however, never gave up his claim to Antioch, and that would lead to sour Byzantine-Crusader relations.⁽⁷⁾

This showed during the Second Crusade (1147), when Emperor John II reasserted Byzantium's claim to Antioch, and the Normans seized the Greek island of Corfu, landed on the Greek mainland, and captured Thebes and Corinth; King Louis VII of France seriously considered taking Constantinople as well. During the Third Crusade (1190), Byzantium went over to the other side completely, allying itself with the Moslems. Meanwhile in Europe the weakening Empire lost control of Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, leaving it with only Albania, Greece and Thrace.

The most blatant perversion of the Crusader business came with the Fourth Crusade. Originally the plan was to attack Egypt, which under Saladin had become the most powerful Moslem state; instead the Crusaders sailed to Constantinople and sacked it (1204). Yet the real villains of this episode were not the ignorant Crusaders, who blindly cut out the Empire's heart, but the Venetians who provided ships and sailors and forced them to do what they commanded when they could not pay their way. The doge of Venice, a fellow in his nineties named Enrico Dandolo, hated the Byzantines; thirty years earlier he had been held hostage in Constantinople, and his captors blinded him by using a curved mirror to concentrate sunlight on his face. Dandolo saw this as an opportunity for both revenge and the elimination of a competitor. The people of Constantinople suffered the usual fate of the vanquished. Churches, palaces, monasteries, libraries, the villas of the rich and the hovels of the poor, were all indiscriminately looted. Good women were hard pressed to keep their virtue; a prostitute was placed on the throne in Hagia Sophia while drunken soldiers danced and turned altars into gambling tables, rolling dice to decide who got each share of the loot. Fire destroyed much of the accumulated art and treasure of nine centuries; bronze statues were melted down to make coins, and priceless objects made of gold, silver, jewels and furs were carted off to western Europe. Eight centuries later, the Fourth Crusade still stands out as the greatest commercial coup of all time.

The Crusaders could destroy the Empire, but they could only hold about half of it. This became the so-called Latin Empire, and the Crusaders elected one of their own, Baldwin of Flanders, to rule it. The locals never gave Baldwin much support, and hated the Catholic Church forced on them. The Byzantine government retained control over a sizeable portion of Western Turkey, now known as the Empire of Nicaea. Greece was divided between Venice, the Crusaders, a Byzantine Despotate of Epirus, an independent fortress in the Peloponnesus (Monemvasia), and various Latin-French duchies. Nicaea and Epirus raced to liberate Constantinople; in 1261 Nicaea's Michael Paleologus got there, and eliminated the Latin Empire with the aid of Genoa, the rival of Venice.

Frederick Barbarossa

Emperor Frederick I, also called Frederick Barbarossa (1152-90), was a handsome, intelligent and warlike leader. To assert that he was equal to any pope, Frederick added holy to his title of Roman emperor, something his predecessors had not done. Then in 1154 he proceeded to Italy, where he received the iron Lombard (north Italian) crown at Pavia.

In 1156 Pope Adrian IV aroused Frederick against the Papacy by writing a letter that told him the emperor's lands were only fiefs granted by the pope. Two years later Frederick incurred the hostility of the Italians by demanding recognition of all his royal rights, including his power to appoint the imperial governor in every town. Such cities as Milan, Piacenza, Brescia, and Cremona considered that demand a denial of their communal liberties and began a struggle that lasted from 1158 to 1183. Frederick led five expeditions into Italy; when he wasn't fighting Milan and its allies, he marched against the reigning pope, Alexander III, who supported the cause of the Italians and excommunicated Frederick (1165). He managed to capture Rome and install an antipope, Paschal III, in 1167. In response, the cities of Milan, Parma, Padua (Padova), Verona, Piacenza, Bologna, Cremona, Mantua (Mantova), Bergamo, and Brescia formed the Lombard League, with Pope Alexander as its leader. Now the Empire's weakness began to show; it was too big and too loosely organized for its knights to keep everything under control. Meanwhile the League rebuilt Milan, constructed the fortress city of Alessandria, and organized a federal system of administration. The result was that when Frederick went on his fifth expedition to Italy, the Lombard League defeated him at Legnano (1176). This battle was significant for two reasons; the Italians had beaten a better than average emperor, and it was the first major triumph of infantry over a mounted army of knights. Frederick was forced in 1177 to acknowledge Alexander III as pope and in 1183 to sign the Peace of Constance, giving the Lombards autonomy but retaining his imperial claim to the towns. From the Italian point of view, the Empire was now an empire in name only.

Frederick did better in central Europe. He made Poland tributary to the Empire, raised Bohemia to the rank of a kingdom, and elevated Austria's status from a margravate to an independent hereditary duchy. In 1180 he secured his authority in Germany by putting down another Welf rebellion, taking away most of the lands belonging to his rival, Henry the Lion.

Frederick initiated the Third Crusade in 1189, gave control of the government to his son Henry VI, and set out for Asia Minor one year later. He won two great victories against the Turks, only to drown in a Cilician river.⁽⁹⁾ Henry quickly proved that he was not somebody to take lightly, for when one of his enemies, King Richard the Lion-Hearted of England, returned from the Crusade by passing through Germany, Duke Leopold of Austria captured him and handed him over to Henry; it took Richard fifteen months and a ransom of £100,000 to regain his freedom. Henry had married the heiress to the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, and he used the ransom money to finance an expedition to southern Italy, where he installed his infant son, Frederick II, as king of Sicily. Thus he was briefly free from the cash flow problems that were now becoming a real problem for the Empire. The result of this was that all Italy was under Hohenstaufen rule, in one way or another. It was an impressive-looking combination.

One of the reasons why the Empire did so badly after this was because much of Europe was now switching from the feudal system of tithes and obligations to the money-based economy of capitalism. The Imperial treasury could not adapt to the changing situation, and saw its cash reserves shrink to zero over the course of the thirteenth century. By contrast, the French king Philip Augustus fussed so much over the tax structure of France, that he nearly tripled his income during his reign.

Innocent III

Innocent's brilliant diplomatic skills, plus the weapon of excommunication, brought other victories abroad. The most significant of these was in England, where in 1205 King John refused to accept the pope's choice for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. Innocent put the Church of England under interdiction, meaning that the Church would not baptize, marry or bury anyone. John seized the Church lands and forced most of the bishops out of England, and Innocent excommunicated the king, declared the throne of England vacant, and invited the French to invade and take it. That forced John to give into the pope's demands (1213), but the pope could not save the king from his own rebellious barons when they forced him to sign the Magna Carta.

The Fourth Lateran Council, called by Innocent III in 1215, was a fitting climax to his career. The council confirmed his actions, showing the Catholic Church to be a strong, disciplined international organization; by now every Christian was expected to answer to the pope first and to any king second.⁽¹⁰⁾ The council also shamefully approved the isolation of Jews from mainstream Christian society, forcing them to wear yellow badges shaped like the Star of David and making them live much of their lives in ghettoes.

If there was any instance where Innocent showed overconfidence, it was in the way he handled the Albigensian heresy. This radical movement, like the Manicheans and Paulicians of earlier eras, emphasized the universal struggle between light and darkness, and viewed Jesus as the enemy of the God who created an evil world, not as God's son. They called for poverty, chastity and a complete elimination of the Church organization; in its place they called for a two-class society made up of those who lived strict lives of poverty, vegetarianism, and renounced all marriage and oaths (called "the Perfect"), and those who did not (called "the Believers"). Its followers in north Italy and southern France called themselves Cathars ("Pure Ones"); we know them as Albigensians because they were most numerous around the French town of Albi.

The Church could not stand such a challenge to its authority. In Italy persecution was sufficient to extinguish the heresy; in France the count of Toulouse, Raymond VI, did not act with sufficient vigor, so Innocent called for a crusade to suppress the menace. The Albigensian Crusade (1209-29) enlisted wandering scoundrels to plunder, kill and rape the most peaceful and righteous subjects of France, doing more damage than even the Moors probably did when they came through the area, five centuries earlier. And in one way the cruelties and abominations of this era are more terrible to read than the persecutions pagan Rome carried out against the early Christians--we know beyond a doubt that the stories are true.⁽¹¹⁾ Here the pope showed that he could start a war, but not that he had any ability to control it.

Another loser in the Albigensian Crusaade was Aragon. As the Catalonian state gained ground against the Moors to the south, it lost ground to the north. In 1196 Provence went to a younger brother of Aragon's new king, Peter II, but in effect it returned to the Holy Roman Empire; fifty years later it passed to the French as the dowry of a bride for Charles of Anjou. Peter was brother-in-law to the count of Toulouse, and when an attempt by him to negotiate a cease-fire at Carcassonne failed in 1209, he entered the war on the side of the count and the Albigensians. However they were outnumbered by the Crusaders, and Count Raymond was a poor general, so the war was mostly a case of the Crusaders capturing one Cathar castle after another. Peter took 1212 off to join Castile in a fight with the Moors (the battle of Los Navas de Tolosa), but in 1213 he returned and was killed while besieging Muret, a castle near Toulouse. In the chaos that followed, the Franco-Aragonese frontier returned to the Pyrenees.

Commerce in the High Middle Ages

The cloth towns boomed. Ghent, the largest producer, and Bruges, the main port, grew to rival London and Paris, the two nearest political centers. Moreover, the trade was not only a benefit for England and the Netherlands; Genoese, Venetian and Pisan merchants found that Flemish woolens were the most popular and profitable product they had to sell.

The Italian cities experienced a growth just as remarkable as that in the Low Countries. In the year 1000, hardly any of them had 5,000 inhabitants. The ones on the coast were in danger from Moslem pirates, while those inland lived in total obscurity. However, by 1200 eleven of them had at least 15,000 people each, and two (Milan and Venice) were approaching 50,000. It was not just a high birthrate which caused this population explosion; the boom in new jobs attracted people to the towns whether they were needed or not. The Italians first used their newfound strength to gain control over their home waters. Then the seamen of Pisa, Genoa and Venice sailed east, to exploit the opportunities created by the First Crusade.

Pilgrims and slaves were an important part of commerce in the Middle Ages, particularly in the Middle East, where slavery was much more commonplace and where visits to holy places had been commanded by Islam. Slavery faded away in Western Europe after 1000 because the Slavs, who formed the raw material, were now Christian, so slavers could no longer capture and sell them with a clear conscience. But their place in the economy was more than filled by pilgrims and Crusaders; the former provided a steady profit, and the latter, though unreliable about payment, opened up and temporarily secured the Eastern markets. By 1150 the Genoese had more money invested in the Levantine trade than in all their other businesses put together. As for the Venetians, they got even more heavily involved. Their perversion of the Fourth Crusade got them part of the Byzantine Empire ("a quarter and a half of a quarter"), which they wisely took in the form of islands. Thus, Venice could sail to Constantinople, Antioch, or Alexandria and have a string of useful and easily-defended bases for more than half the journey. The last vestiges of native enterprise were eliminated, bringing all Greek commerce under Venetian control.

Venice's most serious rival was Genoa, which had become the dominant seaport of the western Mediterranean.⁽¹²⁾ The two became mortal enemies, yet while they fought each other openly in the East, Venice quietly passed many trade goods overland to Genoa for re-export to France (Venetian goods for Germany simply went over the Alps). Since Venice created and supported the Latin Empire, Genoa backed Byzantine efforts to regain Constantinople, and in return, the Byzantines granted Genoa the highly favorable trade concessions that once belonged to Venice.

Among Western exports to the East, woolen goods predominated, though little of it was the aforementioned high-quality fabric of northwestern Europe. Most of what Asia got was produced in north Italy, especially Florence and Milan. As in Flanders, increasing demand and production soon outran the local wool supplies, and they made up for it by importing raw wool from as far away as England. In the twelfth century, silk production started in north Italy. All the large Italian towns supplemented textiles with other manufacturing; for instance, Milan was famous for its metalwork. The use of money returned, spreading from the booming Italian cities to the countryside as the urban population demanded more grain and real estate and paid for them with cold cash, instead of bartering some other product. Thus Western capitalism was reborn and in Italy the feudal system disintegrated.

Nobody had a monopoly in the North Sea. The Scandinavians still dominated fishing, with cod from Iceland and the Lofoten islands, and herring from the Baltic. However, it was English, Flemish, German and French merchants who now delivered and sold the fish.

The Varangian trade network was broken in the mid-eleventh century, when the Polovtsy invaded the Ukraine and put an end to the commerce between Russia and Constantinople. The Russian principalities redirected their exports to the Baltic and their honey, tallow, wax and furs went west in ever-increasing amounts. The Baltic not only carried the Russian trade, though; it was also a richer fishery than the North Sea, and since the pope had decreed that all Christians should eat fish on Fridays⁽¹³⁾, fish ranked in the northern market second only to wool. This attracted Flemish merchants into the Baltic, but because they didn't like making a long detour to get around Denmark, cargoes began to be transported by land across the German district of Holstein, just south of Denmark. This shortcut brought prosperity to Hamburg and Lübeck, the German towns on the North Sea and Baltic ends of the crossing; Lübeck was also blessed with nearby deposits of salt, vital to the preservation of the herring catch.⁽¹⁴⁾ Germany's share of the Baltic trade increased as rapidly and soon became the major one. New German towns were founded in the east, where the ground was cleared by the crusades of the Knights of the Sword and the Teutonic Knights. In fact the Baltic was fast becoming a German sea, interrupted only at the beginning of the thirteenth century, when Denmark burst into activity again. The Danes' valor won them a brief supremacy, but in the 1220s they suffered a crippling defeat. The German trade cartel which replaced the Danes can now be called the Hanse, for though the rules of the Hanseatic League were not put down in writing until more than a century later, the association already existed and was working in pursuit of its goals: exclude foreign traders from the Baltic and take over the trade routes of the North Sea. The Flemish were in fact shut out by 1275, and Flemish trade declined thereafter.

Population Growth and Medieval Republics

A bit of good luck helped; plague disappeared in the eighth century, and the climate was warmer than average from 800 to 1200 (we're up to the "Medieval Warming Period"). Still, good land management was the most important factor; in Chapter 7 we looked at how the Europeans did this. The result was an improved standard of living, but thanks to the resulting population growth, there never was enough land for everyone. Some migrated to the sparsely populated lands east of the Elbe River, where they still could clear out enough acreage to build a homestead. Others didn't go very far but changed their lifestyle more dramatically; they moved to the cities and became part of the new working class. Since Flanders was one of the first places where urbanization took place, Flemish merchants and knights made an unusually large contribution to the First Crusade.

Merchant and monarch both needed to limit the power of the nobility, and since they had to work together to succeed, they got along well. In places where royal authority broke down, and where the towns were rich enough, the richest and most powerful merchants could make their towns independent city-states, with a government run by themselves. The republics of Novgorod and Venice are the best examples of urban plutocracy; by 1300 Germany and Italy had dozens of them. However, such city-states were also in danger of being captured by a despot who had no interest in what the merchants wanted, so they hired mercenaries to keep troublemakers away. Even when this was done, only Venice, protected by its wealth and by its location on an offshore island, was completely successful at preserving its freedom.

The oligarchy of the merchant city-states was the closest thing to democracy that medieval man ever saw. In most countries the vast mass of the population was rural--sullen peasants who asked for nothing but to be left alone. Those serfs who saw their fellows leave the manor for the town grew restless. Extreme wretchedness would lead to a few uprisings in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and sometimes short-lived "popular" governments, all of which were doomed to fail because the miseries they were supposed to correct were caused by a bad economy, not by misrule. There was never any spontaneous call for democracy or human rights in the Middle Ages, and it was only when the state became sick that such aberrations appeared.

Despite the frightful conditions that made up urban life (disease and lack of sanitation, to name a few), a steady stream of peasants migrated to the cities, since they offered the best opportunity for freedom; according to feudal custom, a peasant who could escape from his lord's land and stay away for a year and a day became a free man. With this check on upward mobility gone, the ex-peasants became the new middle class, taking jobs as artisans, merchants, clerks, etc. These town-dwellers⁽¹⁵⁾ increasingly insisted that they be paid for their services in cash, which was more versatile and portable than grain or livestock or bales of cloth or whatever. Since the feudal lords received either goods or labor from their vassals, kings and dukes alike found that they lacked what they now needed the most, namely money. Many arisocrats were reduced to "gentleman beggars"; in France manor houses came to be known as châteaux de la misère.

While Christendom's horizons expanded, the Moslem world merely marked time. North Africa grew slightly, while the Middle East had no more people in the fourteenth century than it did in the eighth. There probably was a modest increase in Asia Minor, when Byzantium prospered under the Macedonian dynasty, but these gains were abruptly erased when first the Turks, and then the Mongols, stormed in from the east. Both of these tribes used terror at every opportunity and were quite happy to leave ruined towns standing empty; they also depopulated the countryside to get enough pasture for their flocks. Numbers fell every time a new group of nomads moved in.

What happened to demographics after 1300? Apparently in Europe the population surge ran out of steam, for in the first half of the fourteenth century, growth was nearly zero. There were widespread crop failures in 1315 and 1316, and the climate deteriorated somewhat; some people call the fourteenth century the "Little Ice Age." What this means is that before the Black Death struck, medieval Europe had reached its Malthusian limits.

The Plantagenets

Stephen won the first rounds, by suppressing rebellions in Devon, Wales and Scotland. Then in 1139 Matilda invaded England (from Normandy). Two years later Stephen was defeated at Lincoln, taken to Winchester and locked up; Matilda was now elected Domina Anglorum. However, she could only hold Stephen prisoner for six months, before the nobles made so much trouble that she was compelled to release him. Of course that could only lead to more trouble, and in 1142 Stephen defeated Matilda at Oxford and destroyed that city; he resumed his reign while Matilda escaped to nearby Wallingford. The next few years saw more ravaging of the countryside, with Matilda's main base of power in Scotland (the Scots hated whomever sat on the English throne, so they were a natural ally of Matilda while Stephen had it). In addition, her half-brother Robert of Gloucester was in control of western England, and an outlaw named Geoffrey de Mandeville plundered Essex and East Anglia. Gradually Stephen prevailed against all of them, and in 1148 Matilda fled to France. There she announced she was stepping down in favor of her son Henry Plantagenet⁽¹⁶⁾, and after he took her place in the conflict against Stephen, he did so well that eventually Stephen also recognized Henry as heir to the English throne. One year later Stephen died (1154), and peace finally came; the English learned from this that one tyrant in London is better than a tyrant in every castle.

Henry II began his reign (1154-89) with an awesome inheritance, stretching from the border of Scotland to the Pyrenees; in another age, it would have been called an empire. From his mother he got England, Normandy, Brittany (Brittany had been a vassal of the Normans since the late tenth century), and part of Wales. From his father he got the heart of France--Anjou, Maine and Touraine--and from his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, he got all of southwestern France. In fact, Eleanor's landholdings made her the most powerful woman of the Middle Ages, and she had the experience to match; when they got married in 1152, she was 30 years old, and he was 19. Previously, Eleanor had been married to Louis VII of France, and had even gone on the Second Crusade, where she brightened up an otherwise dreary adventure by building a few hospitals on the way. Technically the king of England was still a servant of the king of France, but with two thirds of France directly answerable to Henry, he now controlled more land and people than the French king did. It was a fine case of the tail wagging the dog, and you can bet that King Louis was not pleased with this situation, especially because he knew that his failed marriage with Eleanor caused it!

Anyway, the first task for 21-year-old Henry was to make sure the newly won peace lasted. To put the royal treasury in order, Henry II restored the system Henry I had used, having the sheriffs assess property values, collect taxes and bring them to the Royal Exchequer. In addition, he allowed feudal vassals to pay money (scutage) to their lords, as a substitute for giving service, thereby introducing a new source of revenue. To keep law and order, he tore down illegal castles, but in the long run, his legal reforms were more important. He did so much to strengthen common law that he is sometimes called the "common law king," and he would have made a fine lawyer if he wasn't already wearing a crown. Like the other Germanic tribes, the Anglo-Saxons had tried civil disputes and violations of customs by bringing the accused to a meeting of the elders of tribe. The usual methods to determine guilt or innocence were trial by compurgation, combat, or ordeal. In compurgation, friends of the accused would swear to his good character and if enough of them did so, it was figured that he wasn't guilty. In trial by combat, two antagonists would go at each other with fists or clubs. In trial by ordeal, various forms of torture were used, like making the accused stick his arms in boiling tar or forcing him to carry a red-hot iron a specified distance. The most common method was to toss the victim in a pool of water: if he sank, he was declared innocent (and presumably fished out in time); if he floated, he was declared guilty and fined or put to death. All these judgments worked on the assumption that the good Lord would not allow an innocent person to suffer or fall in defeat, and that God would strike dead the man who lied in these circumstances.

Henry's solution was the first trial by jury, which was originally called an inquest. He had the royal circuit judges call in neighbors of the litigants, usually twelve in number, and allow them to question the accusers and defendants in the trial. When all twelve of them reached an agreement, it was said to be vere dictum, or "truly spoken"; from that we get the word verdict. The earliest verdicts may have been faulty because of gossip, but they represented one of the most important steps in the development of today's judicial system. Henry allowed any freeman the right to an inquest, and since only the king could grant them, the barons lost control over their courtrooms. So many people liked the new system that it quickly became the norm.

Next Henry cut the clerical courts down to size, which had jurisdiction not only over priests and monks, but also over Crusaders, students, and servants of the above. Many a churchman could thus break a law of the kingdom and escape punishments that would have meant fines, imprisonment or death to a lay person. Henry decided it was time to act in 1163, when his advisors reported that in the nine years since his coronation, at least a hundred murders and countless lesser crimes had been committed by "criminous clerks" beyond the reach of the king's justice; the worst punishment the clerical courts could give these offenders was defrocking.

Henry ended the abuses of the clergy by holding a meeting with his councilors in Clarendon Park, not far from Salisbury, and there in a hunting lodge they drafted England's first constitution (1164). The Constitution of Clarendon declared that all clergy were bound to follow the customs of the realm, prohibited appeals to the pope to counter royal decisions, forbade excommunication of lords and government officials without the knowledge of the king, and required that anyone convicted in a clerical court must be turned over to the royal court for punishment.

At this point Henry ran into serious trouble from an unexpected source: his old comrade in arms, Thomas à Becket. Becket had been a man of worldly tastes originally, and was not even a priest, but when the position of Archbishop of Canterbury became available, Henry went ahead and appointed Becket, ordaining him first so that he would qualify (Becket went from layman to archbishop in only twelve hours). To his surprise, Becket suddenly began taking his new job seriously; he first supported, then opposed the Constitution of Clarendon, and excommunicated the bishops who sided with the king. For example, he refused to allow a second trial for defrocked clergy, arguing that the Bible said no one should be judged twice for the same crime.

Thomas à Becket stood so firmly for clerical rights that eventually even the pope sent letters telling him he had gone too far, and should reach a compromise with the king. When Becket learned that the bishops were negotiating with the king behind his back, he fled to the Continent, and stayed there for six years. In 1170 he returned--and provoked Henry again by excommunicating three bishops who had taken part in the coronation of the king's son.⁽¹⁷⁾ Henry got so mad that he blurted out, "Is there no one to rid me of this miserable priest?" Four knights took this as the signal to act, and murdered Becket in his cathedral. Henry had a good cry over this, and said afterwards that he did not mean violence, but the barons used this incident as their excuse to stop the king's growing power.

On the military front, Henry held onto all the land he had started with, launched an invasion of Wales that did not gain any new ground, defeated the king of Scotland, William the Lion, and made him a vassal (1174), and began the English conquest of Ireland. The latter was the idea of Pope Adrian IV, the only English pope. In 1155, the pope let Henry II know that the Irish Church was still not conforming to Rome's wishes (something that was supposedly resolved at the Conference of Whitby, in 663), and gave him a gold ring with an emerald set in it, authorizing Henry to conquer Ireland in the name of the pope. But Henry was too busy with other matters, so he didn't act on this until Dermot MacMurrough, the deposed king of Leinster, came to visit and recruit some soldiers to help him against his rivals, the kings of Connacht and Bréifne. The first group of mercenaries crossed the Irish Sea and landed at Wexford in 1169; a much larger force, under a Norman named Richard Strongbow, arrived, marched north and conquered Dublin a year later. In 1171 MacMurrough died, and because he had given his daughter in marriage to Strongbow, Strongbow was now heir to Leinster. At this stage King Henry joined the expedition, to keep Strongbow from becoming a king in his own right, and to get away from England while people were still mad over the killing of Becket. By 1177, all of the island, except for the district of Ulster, had either been conquered or had submitted to Plantagenet rule, so Henry made his son John lord over Ireland and proclaimed the campaign a success.

So far the Irish campaign had been too easy. The Irish had plenty of courage, but their bareback riders and slingers were no match for Norman knights and Welsh crossbowmen. Now England ran into the same problem that kept the Vikings from ruling the whole island--no central authority. With petty kings and chiefs all over the place, there was no way an invading force could capture one king or capital, and declare victory, the way William I had done in England. Prince John found this out in 1185, when he went to Ireland and acted so boorish that no Irish chieftain would swear loyalty to him. In fact, after John left, much of the island was free to do as it pleased, with English control only firm around Dublin and in those areas directly ruled by Norman carpetbaggers (henceforth this zone would be called "The Pale"). Sometimes even the Norman loyalty was questionable; one Norman, John de Courcy, moved to Ulster in 1177, went native, formed alliances with the nearest Irish kings, and proclaimed himself the independent "Earl of Ulster." The end result of Henry's conquest was that England and Ireland have been plagued by each other ever since.

Henry ended his career with some domestic quarrels. Since becoming queen of England, Eleanor had given birth to five sons and three daughters (she only had two daughters when she was queen of France), and as her marriage with Henry soured, she spent her free time patronizing romantic literature and music with a court full of troubadours. When the sons came of age, Henry tried to divide the kingdom between them, but that only caused them to mistrust each other and resent their father. In 1173 Eleanor and three of the sons launched a revolt against Henry; Henry won and kept Eleanor under house arrest ("castle arrest" might be a better term) until he died in 1189.⁽¹⁸⁾

The crown of Henry II now passed to Eleanor's favorite son, Richard I. Today we call Richard "the Lion-Hearted," and he gets a good press in stories like Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, but actually he was a poor monarch; he showed he did not have a talent for administration before becoming king, when he was in charge of Aquitaine for his father, and he did such a poor job there that he frequently had to go in and put down revolts with his sword. Besides that, he was too cruel to be called chivalrous (unless your name was Saladin), spent money like water to pay for his foreign wars, and couldn't get along with his partners on the Third Crusade; at Acre he actually threw down the standard of Austria's Duke Leopold and put up his own in its place, and so badly offended Philip Augustus, the current king of France, that Philip went home before the Third Crusade was finished. As a warrior he was skillful and fearless, and he wrote acceptable verses to go along with his accomplishments, but he failed to take back Jerusalem from the Saracens, lost 95,000 out of 100,000 men, was captured on the way home by the same Duke Leopold he had insulted, and held prisoner in Germany until Eleanor could collect and pay his ransom. Only six months of his ten-year reign were spent in England; he got away whenever he could because the climate was too cold and wet for his liking, and while raising funds for the Third Crusade, he reportedly said, "If I could find a buyer I would have sold London itself." In fact, he became one of England's most popular kings because he was gone most of the time. In 1199 he was fatally wounded by an arrow in an insignificant skirmish, buried in Normandy, and his brother John took his place.

Centralization in France

The fifth Capetian king, Louis VI (1108-1137, also known as Louis the Fat), was the first to successfully strengthen royal power. Louis crushed the lawless barons who defied royal authority in the Ile de France, capturing their castles and sometimes tearing them down. He also used the fact that Paris was an international marketplace to his advantage; any trader who wanted to make a profit in France came to Paris to find many customers, meaning that he would travel on the roads of Paris or on the Seine River. The kings charged a toll on traders and other travelers passing through the Ile de France, and used the revenue gained to pay for their monarchy-strengthening programs. By putting down bandit raids on monasteries and bringing law and order to the towns, and building new churches and schools, they gained the support of the clergy and townspeople. Eventually the lords came around too, when they found that the king's court was the best place to resolve their quarrels impartially.

Louis made his word law in the Ile de France, established a solid base to extend royal power from, and increased the prestige of the monarchy so much that the great duke of Aquitaine gave his daughter Eleanor to Louis' son, Louis VII, instead of to a rival duke. Unfortunately, they failed to have a son, and Eleanor's behavior so scandalized the pious Louis VII ("I thought I married a king," Eleanor once exclaimed, "but instead I am the wife of a monk!") that he got a divorce; Eleanor and Aquitaine now went to her second husband, the future Henry II of England.

We have already described the peculiar situation in the mid-twelfth century, where most of France was actually under the control of the king of England. That situation began to change under Philip II (1180-1223), also known as Philip Augustus. Philip made little headway against Henry II, except to make Henry's life miserable by encouraging his faithless sons, Richard and John, to revolt. When Richard got to be king, he further taunted Philip by building his strongest castle, Chateau Gaillard, on a cliff overlooking the Seine River, just fifty miles from Paris. Richard was so confident of his ability to defend his territory that he boasted, "I could hold Chateau Gaillard if it was made of butter."

Philip was in a hurry to get back from the Third Crusade because he felt Richard had too many French fiefs, and he could do something about it if he returned to France first. He was correct on both counts, but once Richard arrived, he recovered the lost positions. However, Philip got a second chance when John succeeded Richard. This time the cause was a replay of what caused the Trojan War: John had taken the fiancée of Hugh the Brown, the lord of Poitou, as his wife, gave no compensation to the offended noble, and refused to show up when King Philip ordered him to come and explain his actions in person. Philip began the war by invading Normandy in 1202; Chateau Gaillard fell in March 1204, after a seven-month siege, and the rest of Normandy quickly followed. Then in 1206 he occupied Anjou and Maine, thereby taking everything John held north of the Loire River, except for Calais. John now made the recovery of those territories his top priority, and formed an alliance with two other enemies of Philip: Otto IV, the Holy Roman emperor, and Count Ferdinand of Flanders. Together they launched a two-pronged invasion, John landing in the southern province of Poitou, while the Germans and Flemings attacked from the north. Philip's son, Louis VIII, held off the English long enough for Philip to win a decisive victory at the battle of Bouvines (1214); Ferdinand was captured and Otto's horse bolted, carrying away the emperor from the battlefield (his retainers followed, ending German participation in a hurry). By the time the fighting ended, Philip had tripled the size of the French royal domain. With his now-sizeable treasury he paved the muddy streets of Paris and built the Louvre as a fortress to guard the Seine.

Philip also sent out royal agents to collect taxes, administer small communities, and try the cases that had formerly been brought to the lords. In northern France these agents were called baillis (bailiffs), while in the south they were known as sénéchaux (seneschals or stewards). On the surface they resembled the English circuit judges, but instead of going out on a one-time assignment, Philip assigned each one to a district and kept him there for several years. If the man proved himself competent, he got another assignment when this one ended; otherwise he was fired.

In the controversy between the Papacy and the German emperors, the French kings usually sided with the Papacy, because they didn't get along well with the emperors either. However, even in the best of times the kings could collide with the popes; Philip II defied Pope Innocent III by having French bishops annul his marriage. The pope responded by imposing an interdict on France; we saw earlier how that brought England's King John to his knees. Philip backed down, and his wife became queen again. On the other hand, the church inadvertently also helped to expand the royal domain. Philip did not take part in the Albigensian Crusade because he had to keep a watchful eye on his English and German enemies, but he allowed his vassals to do so. After Philip's death, Louis VIII (1223-1226) led a new crusade to exterminate the remaining Albigensians, and used the expiration of a ten-year truce with England as an excuse to overrun Poitou (1224).

Louis VIII's successor, Louis IX, was also known as St. Louis because he prayed for hours at a time and did many good deeds. He founded hospitals, asylums, and homes for the blind and reformed prostitutes; he often fed the poor at public expense, sometimes waiting on them himself. Louis believed himself responsible only to God, who had put him on the throne to lead his people out of a life of sin. Accordingly, he was the first French king to issue edicts for the whole kingdom without the prior consent of his council of great vassals. He also ordered an end to trial by combat and private warfare. Certain matters, such as treason and crimes on the highways, were declared to be the exclusive jurisdiction of the royal courts. In addition to the baillis and sénéchaux, he sent out enquêteurs (inquisitors) to hear the complaints of the royal subjects, no matter how lowly their rank. These men were not judges but good-will ambassadors; the grievances they heard were taken back to the king, whereupon he would act to redress them. Like the trial by inquest system set up in England, the result was a gain in rights for the lower classes, and ordinary people began looking to the king, rather than to their barons, for justice. Often this meant personal involvement, as his friend, Jean de Joinville, explained: "In summer, after hearing mass the king went often to the wood of Vincennes, where he would sit with his back against an oak . . . Those who had any suit to present could come to speak to him without hindrance from any man."

In foreign affairs Louis got mixed results. His English rival, Henry III, made two unsuccessful attempts to recover Poitou, in 1230 and 1242. Then in 1248 he went on the Seventh Crusade, only to be captured by the Moslems in Egypt; he did not come home until 1254, and his mother, Blanche of Castile, ran the kingdom until her death in 1252. In 1258 Louis signed the Treaty of Corbeil, relinquishing to the kingdom of Aragon all French claims to Barcelona and Roussillon, in return for which the Aragonese renounced their claims to parts of Provence and Languedoc. In 1259 he signed the Treaty of Paris, by which Henry III was allowed to keep his territories in southwestern France in return for recognition that Louis was now lord over the ancestral lands of the Normans and Plantagenets. Finally, Louis was forced to get involved in Italy and North Africa by the actions of his brother Charles, which are covered in the next section.

By the end of Louis' reign (1270), every part of France was under some degree of royal control, and France had replaced Germany as the most important kingdom in Christendom. He was succeeded first by Philip III, and then by the last important Capetian, Philip IV (1285-1314, also known as Philip the Fair for his good looks). The opposite of his saintly grandfather, Philip was a man of craft, violence, and deceit. He took advantage of anti-Semitic feelings to expel the Jews from France and confiscate their possessions (Philip's English contemporary, Edward I, had done the same in 1290.). Heavily in debt to the Knights Templars, who had become bankers after the Crusades, Philip had the order suppressed on trumped-up charges of heresy.

Philip formed a committee of ministers to run the day-to-day affairs of the country, and recruited them not from the noble families, but from young law school graduates. As in Italy and England, France had seen its first universities spring up in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the new scholars were just as excited over Justinian's law code as they were over Aristotle's scientific writings. Philip's lawyers found in the old Roman laws a way to justify giving ultimate power to the king, so when a French Parliament, the Etats-Généraux (Estates General), was formed, it acted as a rubber stamp to listen to and approve the king's actions, rather than act as a debating society the way England's Parliament did.

The Estates General was first called in 1302 to hear why the king was acting to remove a pope who demanded too much; it met again in 1314 so the king could explain his reasons for a new tax. In neither case did he allow the delegates to vote on his decision, but they and the common people got the idea that the king was acting with their consent, and working to improve their lives. This assembly was organized into three bodies or "estates": one for the nobles and knights, one for the clergy, and one for the bourgeoisie (townspeople).

Frederick II, Il Stupor Mundi

Because he was only four years old when Henry died (1198), Frederick had to fight for the imperial crown; it was also claimed by Henry's brother, Philip of Swabia, and by Otto of Saxony, the current leader of the Welf clan. At first Frederick's mother acted as regent, but she died only six months later, so Pope Innocent III became Frederick's guardian until he grew up.⁽¹⁹⁾

In 1208 Philip of Swabia was assassinated, and Otto of Saxony became the next emperor. Otto IV was the pope's man before the coronation, but after he got the crown he decided that he wanted to rule like a real king, with nobody telling him what to do. Just a few months later Otto invaded Italy. The pope excommunicated Otto at once, and told the German princes to choose a new emperor; the only candidate with a legitimate claim was young Frederick. Innocent would have preferred crowning an adult, but when Frederick declared he was marching north with only a few followers, the pope had to give his blessing. It was a dangerous journey, with enemies waiting in several places to capture the boy from Apulia; somehow he avoided them all, made it to Germany and found much more support there. In 1212 he was crowned king of Germany at Frankfurt, but it took more fighting, and alliances with France and the Papacy, before Otto was finally defeated (1218).

During the struggle, Frederick made many concessions: to the pope he promised that he would give up Sicily and go on a crusade. To the German princes and bishops he granted several rights that had belonged to the emperors previously, including the right to build castles, grant town charters, and levy taxes. Such decentralization backfired; soon Frederick and his successors would find they no longer had enough political power to keep the Empire in one piece. Among the dukes, he could only hold onto power by diluting it.

Frederick II was the most remarkable man to take charge of the Empire. Though his ancestry was mainly German, he was born in Italy, and always regarded Sicily as his most important province; indeed, it was the only province with much organization above the city-state level. He spoke nine languages, and regularly used five of them: German, Italian, Latin, Greek and Arabic. In an age when religion was everyone's main intellectual interest, Frederick was an agnostic. This probably came about because there were still Moslems on Sicily, allowing him to get a good look at both Christianity and Islam; he ended up claiming that humanity had been deceived by three imposters--Moses, Jesus and Mohammed.⁽²⁰⁾ Once he had a condemned criminal sealed in a barrel and drowned while he and his courtiers listened for the sound of an escaping soul; when they didn't hear anything unexpected, they concluded that the soul didn't exist. Another time, to find out what language the first people spoke, he had a group of orphaned infants sent to a deserted island, in the care of deaf-mute nurses. Unfortunately, when he visited the island a few years later to learn the results, he found that a lethal plague had ruined his experiment. During a gold shortage he successfully introduced a form of money made of stamped leather or parchment, with a promise to pay the holder in gold later--a forerunner of today's paper money. Finally he had the disturbing habit of taking a weekly bath. People gave him the nickname of Il Stupor Mundi, "the Wonder of the World."

For these reasons, Frederick had second thoughts about his promises to the Papacy before long. He did not go when the Fifth Crusade departed in 1218; soon many would think it failed because of his absence. Even worse from the pope's point of view, Frederick refused to abandon Sicily. Instead of making his infant son Henry the king of Sicily, he took him to Germany and made him king of Swabia. However, Innocent's aged and pious successor, Honorius III, needed a strong ruler to save him from the Roman mob, which had just run him out of town. When Frederick returned Honorius to Rome at the head of an army, and promised to rid the Empire of heresy, the pope decided he was all right, and crowned him emperor in 1220.

Though he persecuted local heretics like the Albigensians and Waldensians⁽²¹⁾, Frederick was surprisingly lenient to Moslems. The Moslem community on the island of Sicily was in full revolt at the beginning of Frederick's reign, but he did not massacre or torture them when he put down the rebellion. Instead he deported whole communities to northern Apulia, where he allowed them to continue in their old trades, from agriculture to carpet weaving to arms making; he even let them practice Islam in peace. This act of generosity turned the former rebels into passionate Hohenstaufen loyalists. Later on, he recruited Italian Moslems to serve as his bodyguards, because they were brave and completely immune to threats of excommunication from the pope.

Frederick knew that a modern government needed a well-educated civil service, so in Naples he built Europe's first completely secular university. However, all his efforts to promote intellectual activity were meant to give him more power; he was no friend to democracy or human rights. For example, when parents sent their children to the Church-controlled universities abroad, Frederick told them to bring the kids back quickly when they were finished, to reduce the chance of them picking up dangerous ideas. Accordingly, once he had firm control over Sicily, he tried to strengthen his rule over the rest of the Empire. He couldn't do much with Germany, because its princes were too powerful, and the primitive German economy didn't generate much revenue. However, the fifty city-states of north Italy were another matter; trade and banking gave them lots of cash, and they were much too independent. Frederick called for the head of every state and free city within the Empire to meet with him in a great gathering, at the north Italian city of Cremona, on Easter of 1226. The topics of discussion would be imperial rights in Italy, the suppression of heretics, and why Frederick had not gone on a crusade like he promised; nobody doubted that the first topic would be the main one. It was a bust; nobody came, not even Frederick's son Henry. Instead, the frightened leaders of north Italy revived their alliance from the previous century, the Lombard League, and blocked the Alpine passes to keep the Germans from supporting Frederick. The emperor responded by telling the pope that he would have to forget about the crusade, because north Italy wouldn't give him the knights and funds he needed for an overseas venture. This diplomacy worked with Honorius, who was nearly 100 years old at this point and obsessed with launching the Sixth Crusade. A series of Papal threats and decrees forced the Italians to make a compromise; though the pope would not live to see it, the crusade must go forth.

At any rate, Frederick could not postpone the crusade much longer, due to a personal reason: he had married Isabella, the heiress of Jerusalem, in 1225, and would have to go east to claim her land. When he tried to leave in 1227, an epidemic among himself and his troops brought them back within three days. This was too much for the strict new pope, Gregory IX, so he excommunicated the emperor. That got Frederick to leave again in the following spring, but only a thousand German knights and his Moslem bodyguards were willing to support an excommunicated monarch, so he negotiated a ten-year treaty with the sultan of Egypt, and returned to Italy in 1229.

Frederick's relationship with Innocent III and Honorius III had been an uneasy one; the popes didn't like the fact that they couldn't control this emperor, but they couldn't do without him either. Now under Gregory IX, the Papacy became the emperor's worst enemy, and would remain so for the rest of the Hohenstaufen years. While Frederick was on the crusade, Gregory sided with the Lombard League against the emperor, tried to get a Welf "antiking" elected in Germany, spread a rumor that Frederick had died in the Holy Land, and sent troops to occupy Sicily. Frederick, very much alive, quickly cleared the Papal invaders out of his home base, but Gregory wouldn't agree to cancel the excommunication until the Teutonic Knights (the German Crusaders in the Baltic) and most of the German princes put pressure on him to reach a compromise.

In 1228 Frederick's son Henry came of age, and he tried to rule Germany through an alliance with the rulers of the German states. It didn't work, because Henry had neither his father's diplomatic skills nor his determination. Seeing Frederick's concessions to the Germans as the cause of all his problems, he declared himself in revolt in 1234, with the Lombard League as his ally. Frederick marched north, captured Henry, and kept him confined in the castles of Apulia until his death in 1242. Another son of Frederick, Conrad, took charge of Germany and finished putting down the rebellion. Frederick got the Germans to recognize imperial supremacy at the Diet of Mainz in 1235, but north Italy still refused to do likewise, so in 1237 Frederick made another invasion of that troublesome region.

The Lombard League had nothing that could stop Frederick's German knights and Saracen archers; he destroyed the mercenaries and citizen-soldiers of the city-states at every encounter. Cities, provinces and bishops hastily pledged their allegiance, but then Frederick made the biggest mistake of his career--he demanded everyone's unconditional surrender. This was too much for the Italians, and a new rebellion began while the old one was ending. This time Frederick had complete control of the countryside, but he could not capture the north Italian cities, because he lacked good siege equipment. In fact, the whole Empire had a shortage of siege weaponry, and when Frederick called on every vassal for reinforcements--even Hungary and Provence--the additional forces made no difference. In 1239 Frederick called for the cardinals of the Church to rebel against their master's "dangerous plans," and Gregory excommunicated the emperor a second time. In response, Frederick expelled several religious orders from Sicily, and diverted his troops from north Italy to occupy Tuscany and the Papal State. He declared that he would never return any of the lands he took from the pope, and the entire Papal State, including Rome, would now become part of his south Italian kingdom.

He never got to finish off Rome. While leading a procession to St. Peter's cathedral, the 95-year-old pope met a mob that favored Frederick. Gregory held up a reliquary which was said to contain the heads of the apostles Peter and Paul, and shouted, "O Saints! You must defend Rome, for the Romans will defend her no more." This so shamed the crowd that they tore the imperial eagles off their clothes and manned the city defenses. Soon Frederick, as ill-equipped as ever for a siege, had to give up. Then Gregory announced a great council of the Church for Easter 1241. Frederick rightly expected that the pope would depose him at such a gathering, so he prevented the meeting from happening by blockading the city.

The ongoing struggle between the two most powerful leaders of Christendom not only scandalized Europe, but also put it in great peril. The Mongol armies of Genghis Khan, now led by his son, crushed Russia while the pope and emperor were locked in their vicious quarrel, and in 1241 the Mongols inflicted two more defeats: one against the Poles and Germans at Leignitz, and one against the Hungarians at the Sajo River. Only news of the death of the Great Khan persuaded the Mongols to turn back. If they had continued into central Europe, it's safe to say that they would have made the tenth-century raids of the Magyars look puny by comparison.⁽²²⁾

Some European leaders, notably Louis IX of France and Conrad, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, tried to persuade the combatants to talk peace. Gradually Frederick gained the upper hand; the pro-imperial city of Padua defeated Milan, and Frederick's allies in Pisa destroyed a Genoese fleet carrying Papal delegates to Rome. Gregory died right after agreeing to negotiations, and because of the blockade of Rome, the election of a new pope had to wait until 1243.

The next pope, Innocent IV, was as implacable as Gregory IX had been. For a year peace talks went on, but neither side trusted the other enough to permit a successful conclusion. Suddenly Innocent fled to Lyons in Burgundy, which meant he was still in the Empire but well beyond Frederick's reach. There in 1245 he summoned the Church council Gregory had wanted. The results were what Frederick had feared: the pope declared the emperor excommunicated and deposed, with his subjects released from all vows of obedience.

After that there was no more talk of a compromise. Papal envoys encouraged revolt by offering Frederick's titles to anyone willing to take them. In response Frederick mutilated, blinded or executed the traitors he now saw everywhere. Both sides suffered badly from defeats. Frederick captured several cities in Lombardy, and in Germany King Conrad defeated Innocent's champion across the Alps, William of Holland; on the other hand pro-Papal forces from Bologna captured Frederick's favorite (though illegitimate) son, Enzo, and locked him up for the rest of his life. The fighting went on until Frederick died in Apulia, on December 13, 1250.

Frederick's death must have seemed like a miracle to the Papacy. Nevertheless, the pope still lived in fear that the Holy Roman emperors would grind the Papal State between the northern (German) and southern (Italian) halves of their dominion. Maybe the immediate danger had passed, but who could say that it would never return? The way to prevent this was to get rid of the Hohenstaufens, because only they had a claim to both the imperial and Sicilian crowns. The Papacy soon got a chance to do this; all of Frederick's legitimate sons had died by 1254, leaving Conradin, an infant grandson, as the rightful heir. Within months Conradin was pushed off the throne by Manfred, an illegitimate son of Frederick. The pope denounced this usurpation, declared the imperial crown forfeit, and offered it to France's Louis IX. Louis had enough to keep himself busy, so he passed the offer to his ambitious brother, Charles of Anjou. Charles duly invaded Italy, killed Manfred at the battle of Benevento (1266), and made himself master of the kingdom of Sicily. Two years later, the fifteen-year-old Conradin made another attempt to claim his inheritance; Charles captured him and publicly beheaded the young "viper" in the Naples marketplace. The connection between Germany and south Italy was permanently broken.⁽²³⁾

In the long run, nobody gained much from Charles' Italian adventure. The Papacy had spent much of its moral authority fighting the emperors, and after 1300 its French allies became more dangerous than either the heretics or the Hohenstaufens had been. And Charles came to resemble the demon he had exorcised. Besides Sicily he held Anjou (his original fief in central France) and Provence (which he gained by marriage), and he wasn't going to stop there. Soon the exhausted cities of north and central Italy, including Rome, surrendered their freedom, but two old Norman projects (North Africa and the Balkans) lured him away before he could subjugate the Italians completely. For North Africa he persuaded his brother, a pious but incompetent Crusader, to make an attack on Tunisia, instead of Egypt or the Holy Land. Louis quickly died of dysentery, and all Charles got from Tunisia was a promise of tribute, soon revoked (1272). In 1271 he invaded the Balkans, where he found the last pieces of the Latin Empire looking for a protector, now that the Byzantines had returned to Constantinople. By 1278 Albania and western Greece were his, allowing him to proclaim himself the prince of Achaea.

What all these lands were worth was another matter. Charles and his retainers made themselves so unpopular in Sicily that a full-blown rebellion engulfed the island in 1282. This uprising is called the Revolt of the Sicilian Vespers, because it began during an evening church service near Palermo, where some Sicilians assaulted and killed a group of French soldiers who insulted them. Charles, who was on the mainland preparing an expedition against Constantinople, had to postpone it indefinitely. He couldn't suppress the Sicilians because they invited Aragon's Pedro III to become their king; the Aragonese navy defeated both the Angevin and French fleets easily. Charles died in 1285 and the war went on until 1302. In 1295 James II, the son of Pedro, agreed to a treaty that gave him Sardinia and Corsica, in exchange for Sicily; the Sicilians would have none of this and they crowned James' brother, Frederick II (1295-1337), instead. After seven more years of fighting, this Frederick got a new treaty where both the pope and the Angevins recognized him as king of Sicily. The family of Charles retained Provence and the south Italian mainland, now renamed the Kingdom of Naples. Anjou had been lost when that county became a daughter's dowry in 1290, while the Greek holdings went to a separate grandson of Charles in 1307.

The Magna Carta and the First Parliament

Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called for the barons to demand the rights they had enjoyed under Henry I a hundred years before. After months of secret meetings, the drafting and rewriting of their declaration, and mounting tensions, a small band of lords and knights marched on and occupied London. John's army deserted him, and the barons confronted the king at Runnymeade, a meadow on the banks of the Thames. There they detained John for several days until he gave in and signed their declaration, known afterwards as the Magna Carta (June 15, 1215).

The Magna Carta was written in Latin on parchment; it was a thoroughly feudal document in that while it guaranteed the rights of the nobility, it said nothing about the serfs. Of its 63 provisions, all but 12 are now obsolete; still, we consider it a milestone in the history of political and social development, and one of the first charters promoting freedom. Most importantly it established the concept of Lex Rex (instead of Rex Lex), meaning that no man is above the law of the land, not even the king. Originally the document was supposed to expire after three months, but it became so meaningful to the English (and heirs of England like the United States) that it has become a permanent part of the law; no one in England today would think of running the country without it. For example:

• Article 12 forbade the vassal to pay money to his lord instead of military service without the vassal's consent; from this would come the idea that taxes should not be imposed or raised without the taxpayer's approval.
• Article 20 was a limitation on "cruel & unusual punishment", declaring that a freeman could be fined "only according to the measure of his offenses."
• Article 28 forbade the seizure of "corn or other moveable goods" without immediate payment; this would find its way into the fifth amendment of the US Constitution.
• Article 38 introduced the idea that the accused is innocent until proven guilty.
• Article 39 guaranteed a trial by jury for anyone.
• Article 60 promised equal treatment for both clergy and laymen.

John's son, Henry III, was crowned immediately, but he was only nine years old, so for a decade three regents governed in his name: William Marshall, Hubert de Burgh, and Cardinal Guala. These were responsible men who governed by the Magna Carta, so the kingdom was in good hands. In May 1217 they defeated the French force in London, and destroyed the fleet carrying reinforcements in August, thereby persuading the French to go home. At the age of twenty Henry got to rule by himself, with the approval of the pope.

Though Henry III enjoyed one of the longest reigns in English history (1216-72), he was a poor king. Under him England prospered, but this was in spite of his actions, and political reform came because of his actions. The main problem was that he got along too well with foreigners, especially if they were French or Italian. He never shook off the impression that he was really controlled by the pope; his wife, Eleanor of Provence, was the sister of the king of France, and brought several friends and relatives from Savoy when she came to England; his sister, also named Eleanor, married a French noble, Simon de Montfort, who became the Earl of Leicester. Henry was loyal to the pope, his wife and his friends, but suspected everyone else, so the English nobles saw their rights erode, as they were pushed aside to make room for foreign newcomers.

During the war between Frederick II and the Papacy (see the previous section), he appointed 300 Italian priests to fill vacancies in England, in order to get a share of the revenue collected by the Church (20%). Most Englishmen resented this; in 1245 a Papal legate arrived to raise money from the local clergy, and English nobles threatened to tear him to pieces if he did not leave. When the Hohenstauffen family became extinct, the pope offered Henry the crown of Sicily for £90,000, which would have meant more taxes on the barons against their wishes. Henry accepted, and prepared to send an army to Sicily on this bizarre venture, only to find that he couldn't raise the money he needed; the barons wouldn't cooperate until he agreed to remove the queen's friends. Moreover, a revolt in Wales drove out his troops. In the end he had to let Sicily go to Charles of Anjou, while he dealt with these troubles at home. This took until 1258, when he held a conference with Simon de Montfort, now the leader of the opposition, and they reached the following compromise, known as the Provisions of Oxford:

1. A council of 15 barons would advise the king.
2. The king could make no decision without this council's approval.
3. The council would appoint the treasurer, justiciar, and chancellor, the three most important ministers.
4. All ministers would be responsible to the council.
5. Council meetings, soon to be known as parliaments⁽²⁴⁾, would be held three times a year to discuss issues of the realm. Some knights and other minor nobles would be summoned to these meetings.

The barons won the first round at the battle of Lewes, capturing the king and his son, Edward (1264). Now Simon set up an opposition government, which lasted for fifteen months. This was the first true English Parliament, a grand council with two knights from every shire and two burgesses from every town. He let them do almost nothing, but flattered them by just by inviting them to attend the meeting, and got them to agree that they didn't like high taxes or foreign military expeditions. However, the new order got little popular support, and a year later Prince Edward escaped, resulting in the defeat and death of Simon at the battle of Evesham. Still, Henry got the message. He let Edward do most of the ruling for the rest of his reign, and the next time he wanted to raise taxes (1268), he summoned the knights and burgesses to get their approval.

Edward I also saw the need for reform, and after he became king he would summon parliaments to hear petitions and judicial appeals, to raise money (normally the king's budget was limited to what he could raise from his personal landholdings, about £730,000 a year), and to approve royal decisions. Over the course of his reign (1272-1307) Edward called 34 parliaments; they didn't yet meet at an agreed-on time every year. Gradually, as the rules of parliamentary procedure were worked out, the members organized into four groups or houses:

1. The House of Lords: Most nobles, bishops, and important abbotts.
2. Knights.
3. Merchants and burgesses, to represent the towns.
4. Lower clergy.

Edward I had everything going for him from the start. Because he had peace with the French and with his own people, he could concentrate on completing the conquest of the British Isles, something his predecessors never had much time for. Wales in particular needed pacification, having risen in revolt during the latter years of Henry III. In 1267 the Welsh united behind one leader, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd of Gwynedd. He refused to submit to Edward's authority, so in 1277 Edward launched an invasion that overran most of Llywelyn's lands. The Welsh prince was treated leniently at first, but when he revolted again in 1282, Edward sent a second force to end Welsh independence for good. However, the Welsh still weren't willing to accept an English king, so Edward promised them a prince who did not speak English--his six-month-old son! Thus the future King Edward II became the first "Prince of Wales," and all heirs to the English crown have held the title since then. Edward also tried to conquer Scotland, but didn't do as well there; we'll cover that story in the next chapter.

The Evolution of Castles

After the Empire's fall, Roman walls and buildings were often cannibalized to build churches. For all other building projects, the inhabitants of Dark Age Europe preferred to use wood; it was readily available, cheaper than stone, and carpenters were easier to find/train than masons. For those reasons, we can't point to any castle in present-day England and say, "This is Camelot"; King Arthur's home, if it existed, was a wooden fort that has burned down or rotted away over the centuries.

The second wave of barbarian attacks on western Europe--those of the Vikings, Moslems and Magyars in the ninth and tenth centuries--convinced many that it was time for better defenses. The first castles were built to meet this need. In every case a castle's location was chosen with the idea that it would either (1) increase the strength of a natural obstacle, such as a hill, river or swamp, or (2) create a new obstacle by its existence. Either way, it slowed down an invading force considerably. We often think of medieval warfare as tournament-style duels between knights, but the presence of castles made sieges more common. A whole new form of military science developed around making new weapons to break through a castle's defenses, and to prevent such attacks from succeeding. No military commander looked forward to a siege, because they could be long, expensive and bloody, especially for the attacker. Typically an attacking force had to outnumber the defenders by four to one in order to capture a castle by direct assault, and it took two attackers for every defender just to surround a castle and starve out the occupants.

Economics was a factor in placement as well; a castle cost more than a few pennies to maintain, and it needed people to garrison the structure, dredge the moat, and make repairs. Thus, a castle could not be built very far from the community which supported it, and that community had to be at least reasonably well-off, since the castle, unlike a monastery containing farms or vineyards, did not generate any income. Unfortunately, once the castle was up, it worked too well; not only did it keep the enemy at a distance, but it also allowed the noble who owned it to revolt against his king, or to conduct "private wars" against other nobles. No doubt this slowed down the centralization of government that we discussed earlier in this chapter.

The early castles were made completely of wood, and thus resembled the stockade forts built in unsettled parts of North America before 1900. The most common castle design at this stage was called the "motte and bailey" structure. To build a motte and bailey castle, the first step involved digging a ditch around the whole site, and heaping up the dirt to form a mound (the "motte"). A drawbridge over the ditch served as the castle's only entrance. Sometimes the ditch would be filled with water to make a moat, but even when left dry it made attacks on the castle more difficult. Then a palisade of sharpened wooden logs would be built all the way around the top part of the mound, usually topped with thorn bushes to make scaling them painful. The courtyard (the "bailey") enclosed by this palisade would hold buildings such as the chapel, stables and smithy, as well as a fortified manor house that would serve as a final stronghold for the lord and his men, should an enemy get past the ditch and palisade. After the builders switched to stone, the manor house became the main tower of the castle, called the donjon or keep.

Of course wooden castles were easy to set on fire, but they were also easily rebuilt. In 1139 two nobles, Henry of Bourbourg and Arnold of Adres, were fighting a private war among themselves. Henry secretly inspected the ruins of an old destroyed castle near Arnold's citadel, and ordered a prefabricated castle raised on the same spot. One morning Arnold woke up and saw a complete wooden castle menacing him--one that had not existed a day earlier!

The Normans were the first to build castles out of stone. By the end of the tenth century, France had some castles that were at least part stone; after 1066 these techniques were introduced to England. Once it became clear how much stronger stone castles were, wooden castles disappeared as fast as they could be replaced. One of the oldest standing examples of a stone castle is the famous Tower of London, begun in 1070. Stone also allowed the introduction of features that were not possible before, such as towers built into the main wall. At first the towers were always rectangular in shape, but during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries round towers became commonplace, when it was discovered that they stood up better to attacks from catapults and other siege engines. Another valuable addition was the crenelated battlement, which allowed archers on top of castle walls to fire at attackers without exposing themselves.

After the Normans disappeared, Spain took the lead in castle technology, due to the many wars between Christians and Moors for control of the Iberian peninsula. The Umayyads built hundreds of forts, called alcazabas, while they were in charge. Unlike the Christian strongholds, the alcazabas did not include a keep, since their primary function was to serve as barracks for soldiers, rather than as a noble's house; the Christians usually added a keep after they captured them. In Spain the main building material was not stone or wood but tapia, a mixture of cement and pebbles that produced extremely strong walls and towers. However, the builders shaped tapia by pouring it between boards and leaving it to dry in the sun, so it could not be used to make round towers. Thus, the typical Spanish castle followed the contours of the site it was built on, and had square or polygon-shaped towers. Spain also led the way in developing a stronger gate, as we will see shortly.

Knights returning from the Crusades brought back more ideas on how to improve a castle's defenses. The most important was flanking towers; by spacing towers less than a bowshot apart, and by adding archer's ports in the sides, the defenders could keep the entire wall covered with arrow fire. Conical roofs often capped the towers, to provide further protection at the top. They also added a covered walkway on the outside of the wall, called a hoarding. This made it easier to deal with enemies who got to the base of the wall; by removing floorboards they could shoot arrows, or drop nasty stuff like rocks and garbage on the attackers.⁽²⁵⁾ As with the rest of the castle, this feature was built first with wood, and later with stone; the term machicolation is used for a covered stone catwalk with holes in the bottom for discharging missiles.

Because people had to get in and out of the castle in peacetime, the gate was usually the weakest part of the structure. To remedy this problem, architects from the thirteenth century onwards replaced the simple gate with the barbican, a narrow, well-defended passage between two sets of doors. Other additions included a flanking tower on each side of the gate, and the porticullis, a wood-and-iron grid that was lowered by pulleys behind the drawbridge. All this transformed the gate into the strongest part of the castle, so after this we see castles built with more than one gate in them, making it easier for the defenders to leave and forcing the attacker to bring more men, now that each gate had to be blockaded during a siege.

The peak period for castle building took place during the last quarter of the thirteenth century. Some of the best examples we have from this time are English castles like Conway and Caernarvon, which Edward I built to maintain control over the parts of Wales he had conquered; and Carcassonne, which enclosed an entire town in southern France. After this an economic slump and the infamous Black Death made sure that fewer castles would go up in the fourteenth century. By the time Europe recovered from these calamities, cannon had arrived to knock holes in castle walls, so castles were no longer an effective means of defense. As the architects of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rushed to build new types of fortifications, the castle became nothing more than the ornament of royalty. The last castles raised, such as the Bavarian ones of the nineteenth century (see below and also Chapter 13, footnote #14), were glorified mansions, built to show off the wealth and exalted status of the owner.

Central Europe's Technological Experiment

Mining had been practiced by the Romans, but most mines had been abandoned during the Dark Ages. One metal that remained in constant use was iron, due to the obvious need for farming equipment and weapons. Gradually, the iron was supplemented with rich deposits of gold, silver and copper that were present in Germany. Then the Germans took the water mill--a device used strictly for grinding grain so far--and applied the machinery to mining. In those places where streams froze in the winter, the winds continued to blow, so there the windmill took the place of the water mill. By 1300, there were mills driving the tools for fulling cloth, tanning leather, sawing wood, and crushing ore; other mills operated the bellows for blast furnaces, the hammers of forges, the millstones used to finish and polish arms and armor, and grind pigments for paint and mash for beer.

At first the owners of the properties containing mines claimed the yields they produced and used their serfs to work them. Then Frederick Barbarossa declared that all mines belonged to the emperor, and all mining was done under state control thereafter. In England the Crown claimed gold and silver deposits, but allowed the landowners to keep the profits from other metals, so long as royalties were paid to the king. The capital needed to get mining operations started came from Italian bankers, and sometimes from kings, queens and members of the bourgeoisie who invested in the venture.

Germany's products and technology set the standards for the rest of Europe. When in 1551 Spain reopened a silver and lead mine that had lain unused under the Moorish occupation, 200 skilled German miners were hired to operate it. England's Elizabeth I also looked to Germany for technicians and skilled laborers, and Norway did the same when it opened a silver mine in 1623.

Our medieval ancestors were fascinated by the combination of color and light, which shows in the rich decoration of churches with stained-glass windows. In the process they invented the lens, possibly through an accidental discovery by a Venetian glassmaker. Italians were using eyeglasses by the thirteenth century.

Science as we know it was not practiced before the modern era, but what we call the scientific method was first articulated by Roger Bacon (1210-93), a thirteenth-century Franciscan monk who taught at the universities of Paris and Oxford. Bacon criticized the scholars of his day for paying too much attention to Aristotle--not because they disagreed with the teachings of Christianity--but because their preoccupation with the classics kept them from conducting studies and experimentation in the world around them. "If I had my way," he wrote in one fit of exasperation, "I should burn all the books of Aristotle, for the study of them can only lead to a loss of time, produce error, and increase ignorance." Aristotle himself probably would have agreed with this, had he known that some day educated men would treat bad translations of his work like Bibles, containing all possible knowledge. If only they would get their noses out of books and try some new research, Bacon argued, than someday science would work wonders more amazing than magic. "Machines may be made," he predicted, "by which the largest ships, with only one man steering them, will be moved faster than if they were filled with rowers; wagons may be built which will move with incredible speed and without the aid of beasts; flying machines can be constructed in which a man . . . may beat the air with wings like a bird . . . machines will make it possible to go to the bottom of seas and rivers."

In previous eras diseases had been viewed as the wrath of God, and medicine was just another form of magic. But the Crusades and trade with the Islamic world introduced Arabic drugs to Christendom, and by the eleventh century Italy had seven medical schools to teach Greek, Arabic and Hebrew medicine. Gradually the standards required of doctors rose, laws were enacted concerning the licensing of their practice, and some cities (notably those in Flanders) began to take an active concern in the cleanliness of food and water.

The twelfth century saw the first European hospitals as well. At first they were simple whitewashed wooden structures, founded by the monasteries, but soon kings, queens, and wealthy bankers were building their own, and city governments were running them. The second generation of hospitals were two to three-story buildings, with marble pillars in front to make them resemble palaces; usually they were built outside the walls of the city to isolate infected patients from the general population.

As the fourteenth century dawned, progress in politics, economics, technology and social services was visible everywhere. Medieval man had institutions that handled justice more fairly and made it easier for him to live in peace with his neighbor. He could send his sons to school, and if he lived in the city, he could move to a higher station in society. He had products that were unknown to his ancestors, and new ways to earn the money to buy them. He also had hospitals to care for the sick, and the beginnings of a science that could discover why people got ill in the first place. A great future may have been expected, but few could see that misfortune hovered just beyond the next horizon.

1. Ethelred's unflattering nickname, "the Unready," meant the opposite of what it means today; if anything, he was too "ready." In this case the word "ready" does not mean "prepared" but comes from the Old English word rede, meaning counsel. Thus, Ethelred behaved as if he had no advisors, ignoring them and acting rashly when his wise men recommended caution.

2. There is a commonly told tale about Canute on a beach, trying to command the waves. What happened was that his admirers in court flattered him by saying that he was so powerful he could order the waves to recede. Canute proved them wrong by having his throne carried out to the beach, and when he issued commands to the sea from there, nothing happened.

3. The first man on Stamford Bridge was a huge Viking, who had gone berserk (see the berserkers in Chapter 7) and cut down every one of Harold Godwinson's soldiers that tried to cross the bridge. He singlehandedly held off the entire Anglo-Saxon army for an hour, until Harold's force sent a small boat (a coracle), and as it passed under the bridge, a spearman leaped up and impaled the berserker from underneath. This inglorious "goosing" probably explains why the Viking's name is not remembered, or why his heroic last stand is not seen as a repeat of what Leonidas and Horatius did.

4. The atheistic Edward Gibbon noted gleefully that when the Normans recaptured Rome for the pope, they brought Moslem troops from Sicily, who must have thoroughly enjoyed their opportunity to loot the capital of Western Christianity.

5. In 1037, the dynasty ruling Leon became extinct. Ferdinand added Leon to Castile and called himself "emperor of all Spain" after that.

6. At least that is what the legend says. According to historians, the true story is that El Cid's wife led the defense of Valencia for three years and then fled the city, taking her husband's body with her.

7. The first four Crusades are the main topic in Chapter 11 of my Middle Eastern history. For the later Crusades, read Chapter 12.

8. In 1147 Conrad III finished conquering the lands between the Elbe and Oder Rivers, by leading a crusade against the Wends that didn't stop until he reached the Baltic. Thus, the future duchies of Pomerania and Brandenburg passed from Slavic to German rule.
The conflict between the Welfs and the Hohenstaufens spilled over into Italy, and the names of the leading factions lasted there for the next two centuries, long after they had lost their meaning in Germany. The Italians changed the name of the Welfs to Guelph, and their opponents became the Ghibellines (after Waiblingen, the name of the Hohenstaufens' ancestral castle). Among the city-states of north Italy, the Guelphs favored a strong Papacy, while the Ghibellines favored a strong secular monarchy.

9. After this tragedy a rumor spread that Frederick wasn't really dead; instead he was sleeping in a cave, and would return to lead when the Germans needed him the most. That legend provided the source of the name Adolf Hitler would use for his 1941 invasion of Russia--Operation Barbarossa. Similar tales of "sleeping giants" have been told about other very popular kings, from King Arthur to Charlemagne to Elvis Presley.

10. Innocent III explained how he viewed the relationship between popes and emperors in Sicut Universitatis Conditor, a paper he wrote in 1198:

"The Creator of the universe set up two great luminaries in the firmament of heaven; the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night. In the same way for the firmament of the universal church, which is spoken of as heaven, he appointed two great dignities; the greater to bear rule over souls (these being, as it were, days), the lesser to bear rule over bodies (these being, as it were, nights). These dignities are the pontifical authority and the royal power. Furthermore, the moon derives her light from the sun, and is in truth inferior to the sun in both size and quality, in position as well as effect. In the same way the royal power derives its dignity from the pontifical authority: and the more closely it cleaves to the sphere of that authority the less is the light with which it is adorned; the further it is removed, the more it increases in splendour."

11. There was a chilling example when the Crusaders broke into the city of Béziers. One of them asked Arnaud Amaury, the Papal legate commanding the army, how to tell the difference between Catholics and heretics, and the answer he got was, "Massacre them all, for the Lord knows His own!"

12. At first Amalfi was the most prominent port west of Rome (ninth-tenth centuries). Pisa became important in the eleventh century, but not until the Normans ruined Amalfi (1131) were the Pisans able to operate in the West without competition. That ended in the last years of the twelfth century, when Pisa was forced to yield first place to Genoa.

13. This decree did not stem from any Biblical commandment; the pope who did it wanted to help the fishing industry.

14. This made Lübeck the natural choice when a location was needed for the headquarters of the Hanseatic League.

15. The archaic word for town was burg. Hence the inhabitants of cities were called burgesses in England, bourgeoisie in France, and burghers in Germany.

16. Because the Plantagenets had their original home in Anjou, some history books call them the Angevins instead.

17. Becket felt that coronations were something only the Archbishop of Canterbury (namely himself) should perform.

18. Henry II's eldest son (1155-83), now called "Henry the Young King," must have been the most spoiled prince who ever lived. Henry II may have caused this by fussing over him too much; he opted for a co-regency, crowning the younger Henry king at the age of 12, while he was very much alive and well. At the feast that followed, Henry II even waited on his son, telling him, "Surely no man alive has so noble a servant." to which the prince sarcastically replied, "It is only fitting that the son of a count should wait upon the son of a king." After that he constantly demanded more money and power from his father; even being made duke of Normandy and count of Anjou didn't keep him from joining Eleanor's rebellion. Fortunately for England, he died of a fever at the age of 28, so he never got to rule alone. Unfortunately, Henry II's other sons weren't much of an improvement, as you will see if you read on.

19. Henry VI never got along well with the Church; no doubt he would have been appalled to know that Innocent was managing the Empire for his son. Henry liked to motivate the troops by having nuns stripped naked, smearing them with honey and feathers, and sending them on horseback past his cheering men.

20. Sicily was where Islam, Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity met, making for one of the richest cultures in Medieval Europe. Frederick's main palace at Foggia, in the district of Apulia, was a luxurious haven of Oriental splendor with eunuch-guarded harems, scholars, philosophers, poets, musicians and exotic animals, like the one the Normans had at Palermo previously. Nearly a century later, Dante called Frederick's court the birthplace of Italian poetry.

21. Frederick treated the Jews no better and no worse than other Italian rulers. With the Inquisition getting started elsewhere at this time, this was probably a good thing.

22. Frederick's favorite hobby was falconry, and he wrote a manual on the care and training of falcons which still exists, called The Art of Hunting with Birds. The book was richly illustrated with pictures like this one, which shows Frederick with a hooded falcon.

23. Thanks to the campaign of Charles, France would be preoccupied with gaining control over Italy for much of the next six hundred years.

24. The name Parliament comes from the French verb Parler, meaning "to speak."

25. Our imagination conjures up visions of a castle's soldiers dumping boiling oil on those enemies who tried scaling the walls, but oil was usually too expensive for this. Boiling water or red-hot sand worked nearly as well, as it could get between the joints in a suit of armor.

© Copyright 2001 Charles Kimball