The zeal with which entire communities would approach saints who offered a specialist expertise was as great as ever. The 14th-century figure of Roch (or Rocco) of Montpellier was deemed useful when the plague struck, and Margaret, an Anglo-Saxon princess who became Queen of Scots (c.1045–93), had been emblematic of the devout and philanthropic ruler ever since her canonization in 1250. Catherine of Alexandria, who was condemned in c.305 to die on the breaking wheel—a Roman instrument of torture—acquired a huge following in late medieval Europe. Her relics were to be found at the monastery, located on Egypt’s Mount Sinai, that bore her name, and the pilgrimage route to her remains was one of the major international trails followed by the devout.
LEFT This wooden statue of a black Madonna stands in the Cathedral of Santa Eulalia, Barcelona. It was probably produced in Italy, during the 13th or 14th centuries.
DARING TO BE DIFFERENT
Heretics held views that contradicted the Church’s orthodoxy. Although the Cathars were the most notorious examples there were many other sects who were treated with equal intolerance. The followers of Peter Valdez (c.1140–c.1218) in southern France and north Italy started as mainstream Christians who were especially attracted by New Testament injunctions to shun riches and to preach the gospel to the poor. Their zeal in doing so attracted the hostility of Church leaders who thought that preaching was a job for priests rather than for lay enthusiasts. It was their persistence as lay preachers, rather than any doctrinal reasons, that led to the Waldensians’ initial condemnation as heretics by the Church in 1184. Having been given the label, they then started to embrace a whole set of genuinely heretical beliefs. By the early 13th century the Waldensians constituted a separate ecclesiastical structure that rejected both the idea of a priesthood and the notion of sacraments. Waldensians, rather like the Cathars, despised the official Church’s association with riches and hierarchical power, and the sect stressed that spiritual insight and an ability to communicate with God was a result of individual merit rather than a reflection of the sacraments’ efficacy.
ABOVE This illustration from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563) shows the Lollard John Badby being boiled to death in a barrel in 1410.
Direct access to the Bible translated into vernacular languages was central to the Waldensians’ appeal. The same is also true of the Lollards who followed John Wycliff in late 14th-century England and of the Hussites who followed their example in Bohemia a generation later. In all these cases it was the fear of being rejected by an individual conscience informed by its own interpretation of the New Testament that led the Church to anathematize the dissenters as heretics.
Although Francis of Assisi embraced a ministry that preached the corrupting effects of riches, he and his immediate followers in the Order of Friars Minor (“the Franciscans”) were impeccably orthodox in terms of Church doctrine. But when the official Franciscans changed their Order’s rules after the death of the founder so that it might own material goods, an alternative grouping called the “Spiritual Franciscans” emerged. These dissidents stated that all Franciscans should adhere to the founder’s poverty and mendicancy. Their advocacy of the view that Christ and his disciples had owned nothing, was denounced as heretical by Pope John XXII in 1322. Most of the “Spiritual Franciscans” eventually submitted but the Fraticelli, a disparate mass of splinter groups, continued to preach apostolic poverty in 14th-century Italy. Their denunciations of the established ecclesiastical order showed how the people rejected as “heretics” by popes, bishops and councils of the Church could nonetheless display an enduring spiritual vitality.
MYSTICS
The Christian mystics of medieval Europe claimed to have been granted a special revelation: God had revealed himself to them in visions whose effects infused their entire being with the knowledge and love of the divine.
Most were orthodox in their attachment to the Church’s teachings, as in the case of England’s Margery Kempe (c.1373–c.1438) and Dame Juliana of Norwich (c.1342–c.1416). Hildegard of Bingen (c.1098–1179) started to have visions when she was a young child, and this German abbess would have been remarkable in any age with her polymathic gifts as a composer, playwright, poet, expert botanist and highly acclaimed public preacher. She conducted four extensive preaching tours across Germany. Hildegard also enjoyed the support of Bernard of Clairvaux—always something of a litmus test in demonstrating orthodoxy—in calling for further reforms of the Church from within, including the abolition of simony. Others with mystical gifts were more of a problem for the Church authorities.
Joachim of Fiore (c.1135–1202) was inspired by the New Testament’s Book of Revelation and by the Gospel’s proclamation of an imminent and transformational kingdom of God. Born in Calabria, where he founded an abbey at Fiore which adhered to a tough interpretation of Cistercian monastic discipline, Joachim was a voluminous author whose writings revolve around the notion of three distinct phases in humanity’s history. The Old Testament era had been the Age of the Patriarchal Father, who ruled through the exercise of power and by inspiring fear. The New Testament period was the Age of the Son, whose greater wisdom was evident in the foundation of a Catholic and sacramental Church. The Age of the Holy Spirit, or Third Age, would be the next stage in this progressive ascent, and its emphasis would be on egalitarian and communal values. A Church hierarchy would become unnecessary during the period that was dawning. Furthermore, the divisions between Jews, the Greek Church and the Western Latins would be transcended within a new dispensation guided by the spirit of the Gospel and by God’s love, rather than by a slavish adherence to the letter of the law.
Joachim’s humility and evident holiness of life saved him from persecution, and he even enjoyed the active support of Pope Lucius III (r. 1181–85). Thomas Aquinas disapproved of his teachings but, equally unsurprisingly, Joachim was a popular figure among many Franciscans, and Dante thought he was possessed of a genuine gift of prophecy. Joachim gave something of a hostage to fortune by nominating, albeit tentatively, the year 1260 as the time when the Third Age would actually start. Once that year had come and gone his posthumous reputation came under increasing attack, and in 1263 he was officially condemned as a heretic by the Church.
Hildegard of Bingen is depicted in the frontispiece of Scivias, dictating the details of a vision to her scribe, Volmar. Scivias sets out the 26 visions that Hildegard experienced during her lifetime.
MEDIEVAL SOCIETY
285–c.1350
At the beginning of the early medieval period Western European society was characterized by a fragmentation of authority and widespread de-urbanization whose causes can be attributed to the formal division of the Roman empire in 285. Economic, military and political resources tended to be concentrated in the East thereafter, and in the West the countryside was increasingly dominated by an aristocracy of landowners and senior soldiers, mostly based in large villas and newly fortified towns. The estates of Western Europe were worked by slaves, by freedmen who had once been slaves, and also by coloni—formerly independent farmers who had subordinated themselves to the great landowners in order to gain protection against imperial tax collectors and the demands of military conscription. Such landowners could dispense local justice and even assemble private armies. The Western economy became ruralized and regional. Trade with the Mediterranean economies diminished, and most of the goods bought and sold were locally produced.
It was into this world that the Germanic tribes known to the Romans as barbari and externae gentes (“barbarians” and “foreign peoples”) moved in increasing numbers from the late fourth century onward. With the frequent cooperation of local Roman officials, and enjoying the support of provincial citizens, the tribal leaders came to rule in the provinces of Gaul, Iberia, Italy and Britain, and it was in these regions that they established themselves as kings.
Communities in areas of medieval Europe that had been part of the Roman empire were able to build on the institutional and architectural heritage of the Roman pas
t. Rome’s unit of local government was the civitas, which was composed of a local town and its surrounding countryside. These civitates were much more numerous in Italy and in the Western provinces compared with the areas in the empire’s north and east, and each had its bishop. During the fifth and sixth centuries bishops in southern France and Italy increasingly assumed the roles previously performed by Rome’s provincial officials. Bishops now controlled the civil administration of their local civitas and were responsible for securing its supplies.
RIGHT Peasants work the fields in front of the Château de Lusignan in this image from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a 15th-century book of hours.
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MEDIEVAL SOCIETY
285 Rome’s empire is divided: resources will be concentrated in the East, while authority fragments in Western Europe.
c.500 Bishops in southern France and Italy assume local governmental responsibilities in the civitates of the former Roman empire.
c.900 The manorial system is widespread across Western Europe.
c.950–c.1250 Europe has long, hot summers and mild winters. Agricultural productivity and population levels increase.
c.1000 Landowners have driven formerly free peasants into serfdom.
c.1050 Emergence of knighthood. “Lordship”—a reciprocal exchange of loyalty and duty—is becoming the Western European social model.
c.1150 Aristocratic families now define themselves exclusively according to the patrilineal line and are associated with an inherited property, often a castle, which supplies the family name.
c.1200 Serfdom continues to expand in Eastern Europe but declines in the West.
c.1350 Europe’s population levels plummet due to famine and plague.
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LANDLORDS AND SERFS
The social patterns associated with the late Roman countryside—its landlords, peasants and slaves—survived for almost half a millennium after the dissolution of imperial authority. The same is largely true of its characteristic landscape of cultivated fields, orchards and dense forests. One major development, well established by the ninth century, was the manorial system which organized the relationship between landlords and peasants in working the land. Manors may well have evolved out of the social structures associated with the late Roman villa. The demesne was the part of the manor that the landlord, using peasant labor, farmed for his own purposes. The remainder was farmed by the peasants for their subsistence while paying the lord a rent, which could take the form of agricultural produce, provision of their own labor, or cash.
As central royal authority diminished in the post-Carolingian ninth and tenth centuries landowners had every incentive and opportunity to cultivate their lands more intensively and to exercise their territorial rights of lordship more vigorously. Many formerly free peasants and slaves now came to belong to a new social grouping, the serfs. Servus had previously been used to describe slaves and now referred to the serfs who, while not personally owned by their lords, were nonetheless tied to his lands. (The new word for a slave, sclavus, owed its origin to the Eastern European Slavic societies which produced, and exported, so many slaves.) The number of serfs continued to increase until the late 12th century, when the development of a more money-based economy made free and rent-paying peasants a more attractive proposition to landlords than bound serfs. The institution gradually disappeared in Western Europe from that time onward. In Eastern Europe, however, serfdom actually increased in importance with an alliance between monarchs and lords leading to the formation of huge agrarian estates whose produce was designed to feed the growing Western market.
The aristocracy in the West also exploited its position by taking over the bannum—the public power to command and punish—that had been the prerogative of monarchs before the ninth-century decline in royal power. Local courts allowed the nobility to enforce its will, to expand cereal cultivation by clearing forests and to keep the rest of the woodland to itself for hunting purposes. Peasants and serfs did not just provide the nobility with labor. They were now being forced to use the mills and markets that were owned and run by nobles. They were also obliged to settle in villages whose growth in size paralleled the spread of a system of parishes, centered on the local church and paid for by the imposition of a tithe—one-tenth of the dependent classes’ agricultural produce.
TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES
Between the year 1000 and the mid-14th century, Europe’s population may well have doubled to nearly 75 million. That increase was concentrated in the continent’s north, where a trebling of population levels illustrated the effect of the protein-enriched and meat-based diets that became possible as a result of better farming techniques. The bean, imported from the Middle East to Muslim-conquered Spain, was brought north to the rest of the continent, and better pasturage led to a great increase in the number of cattle that could be bred for European consumption.
Technological breakthroughs associated with horses, water mills and windmills powered the rural economic advance. The ox had been the traditional beast of burden, but the draft horse, shod with iron horseshoes enabling the hooves to negotiate their way through damp northern European soils, was quicker and more efficient. By the late-tenth century the addition of the horse-collar, which enabled a burden to be hauled using the shoulders rather than the neck, increased the animal’s pulling power.
ABOVE A miller and windmill are depicted in the Luttrell Psalter of c.1340. Windmills became common in Europe from the late 13th century onward.
The increasing numbers of water mills, which ground grain into flour, capitalized on Western Europe’s extensive river network, while windmills—a technology imported from the Middle East—supplied power in areas where rivers were scarce. European forests and mountains produced the timber, fuel and metallic ores that provided raw materials for new technologies. Many areas were denuded of their forests as a result of the demand for timber used in constructing new ships, public buildings and private houses. Advances in metallurgy produced better quality swords, daggers and armory for soldiers. Technological sophistication could also be seen in the glazed pottery and glassware frequently used in even quite modest households, and the houses of the mass of the population were increasingly being built of stone rather than wood and thatch.
Climatic fluctuations gave the North Atlantic region a warm period (c.950–c.1250), and the productivity of medieval Europe’s rural economy benefited from long hot summers and mild winters. These conditions also assisted the construction of the great Gothic cathedrals of the central Middle Ages, since builders had longer periods of clement weather for their out-door work. The architectural skill, technical knowledge and managerial capacity that enabled cathedrals to be built were also evident in the growth of towns from the 11th century onward. Large numbers of peasants, freed from the need to work the land as a result of increased agricultural productivity, migrated to urban centers.
RIGHT Peasants and masons build a new city in the 14th century, from a French manuscript version of the prose romance Girart de Roussillon.
THE GROWTH OF TOWNS AND CITIES
Carolingian Europe’s few cities were small-scale affairs. Some were redesigned Roman towns—especially in Europe’s Mediterranean south—and most early medieval European urban centers existed to serve the needs of kings, bishops and monasteries. Subsequent urban development, however, reflected the economic needs of local lords, and in northern Europe in particular new cities came into being as centers for the local markets. From the tenth century onward, large numbers of mercantile and craft-based guilds were becoming established within towns in order to protect their members’ interests. Merchants’ guilds played a particular role in the emergence of self-governing cities or communes—a development that underlined the distinctiveness of urban life and set it apart from the rural world of the village and estate. Nonetheless, cities had to protect their food supplies, chains of communication and trade routes. In both northern and southern Europe, therefore, the surro
unding rural region was closely linked to the city.
Many of Europe’s newly flourishing urban and civic centers were associated with new manufacturing processes. The cities of the southern Low Countries, for example, had a particular expertise in dyeing, weaving and finishing wool. Other towns specialized in the manufacture of metalwork and armaments, and some operated as market centers for products that could not be produced locally, such as wine. These specialist goods were then transported and distributed along extensive trade routes, and the rivers of Western Europe, where many cities were located, provided an important network of communications.
The formulation dividing society into those who fought, prayed and labored enjoyed great vogue in the 11th and 12th centuries, and the structure of the second order, the clergy, was well established by c.1200. As the European economy developed and diversified from the 12th century onward those who “labored” came to include merchants, financiers and lay professionals as well as peasants and artisans. The distinction between warriors and “laborers” intersected with European society’s more formal and legal divide between those who were free and those who were not. The un-free could not join armies at even the lowest level of soldiering, and ordinary soldiers were keen to maintain a clear difference between their own status as free men and the mere laborers of the countryside. That strenuous assertion by the lowest ranks of serving men shows the extent to which large numbers of once-free peasants had been coerced into serfdom.
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