by Ian Mortimer
Rethinking the question in the years since 2009, and walking through high-shelved corridors and library halls to research this book more thoroughly, I have felt overwhelmed by the scholarship of our society, especially the output of the last 60 years. In one library I was struck motionless by the feeling of never being able to know enough to write a book like this properly Several centuries have threatened to overwhelm me, towering above me like huge shadows. I faced a wall of books about the Crusades and felt as nameless and insignificant as the people hacked to death in the streets of Jerusalem in 1099. I walked into a room full of books about eighteenth-century France and almost despaired. Any historian who does not retain a degree of humility in confronting so much evidence is deceiving himself, and anyone who does not admit to his or her inadequacy in writing authoritatively about the human past on this scale is a fraud. Of course I would very much like to know everything in order to supply the most thorough and well-informed answer possible to the question I have raised, but there is only so much information the human mind can retain. In my case I have had the advantage of working in the field of English history since my teenage years, first as an amateur, then as a student, an archivist, and finally as a professional historian and writer. As it is English history that I have researched for thirty years, there is an inevitable imbalance in this book in that most of the statistics I quote relate to England, but my choice of changes has not been limited to those that have affected this country. Rather I have selected subjects that affected a major part or all of the West and I have used English facts and figures where they illustrate the practical aspects of a change or to convey a sense of proportion. That seemed better than ignoring my field of expertise in order to even out the geographical imbalance.
It may well be that you do not agree with my choice of the century that saw the most change. It may well be that you remain defiantly convinced that none of the wars, famines, plagues and social revolutions of the past are as significant as being able to use a mobile phone or buy your weekly groceries via the Internet. It does not matter. The aim of this book is to provoke discussion about what we are and what we have done over the course of a thousand years, as well as what we are capable of doing and what is beyond our capabilities, and to estimate what our extraordinary experiences over the last ten centuries mean for the human race. If a few more people discuss such questions, and thereby realise something about human nature over the long term and consider how that insight can be applied to the future, it will have succeeded.
Ian Mortimer
Moretonhampstead, Devon
1001–1100
The Eleventh Century
I am writing these words on the top floor of a three-storey house in a small town called Moretonhampstead – or ‘Moreton’ as most people call it here – which is situated on the eastern edge of Dartmoor in Devon, south-west England. It bore the same name, Moreton – ‘the place in the moor’ – in the eleventh century. However, the name and the granite bedrock on which it is built are about the only things that have not changed over the intervening period. One thousand years ago there were no three-storey houses here. There weren’t even any two-storey ones. The dozen or so families resident in the area lived in small rectangular huts of stone and earth. The one room was heated by a central hearth, from which smoke billowed up to the blackened rafters. These houses were cut low into the hills to avoid the weather coming off the moor, and were roofed with thatch of bracken or straw. The inhabitants lived a tough life, eating mainly vegetables, cheese and the hardy grains that they could grow in the acid soil, such as rye, oats and vetches. No one could read or write; there were no priests here, no parish church. There may have been a crudely carved granite font in the house belonging to the king’s bailiff, and a cross where an itinerant preacher would tell stories from the New Testament, but that was all. Although some twenty religious communities are known to have existed in Devon at that time, the nearest two were the bishop’s modest cathedral at Crediton, some 13 miles to the north, and a small monastery in Exeter, 13 miles to the east. Neither of these amounted to much more than a small oratory attended by a handful of priests. The visit of a holy man to Moreton would have been a rare event. So would a feast.
The differences between ways of life then and now are all the more profound when you start to examine the things we take for granted. For example, virtually everything I own was purchased at some point, whether by me, my friends or my family. My predecessor living in Moreton in the year 1001, on the other hand, might never have handled money in his life. It did exist, in the form of silver pennies – King Ethelred the Unready minted considerable numbers of them to pay the invading Danes – but for a householder living in Moreton in 1001 there was little to buy: he had to make most things himself. If he wanted a bowl, he had to carve one out of wood. If he wanted a cloak, he had to obtain wool from local sheep, twist it by hand into thread, weave it into cloth, and finally tailor it. If he wanted to dye his new cloak, he had to prepare the colours from natural plant dyes, such as woad (blue) or madder roots (red). If he had to pay for any of these things, it would be an exchange in kind: he would probably offer animals, skins, meat or eggs – or that bowl he had so laboriously carved. There was simply very little need for cash: most householders only needed it to pay rent to their lord or to acquire something like a cauldron, a knife or an axe that could not be made locally. As a result of this scarcity of coin, hardly any silver hoards from this period have been found in the West Country. Coin production in Europe as a whole was very small, but in Devon it was almost unknown.1
The one place where you would have needed silver pennies was a market town. In the early eleventh century, however, there were only four such places in the whole of Devon: Exeter (13 miles), Totnes (22 miles), Lydford (on the other side of a trackless and boggy moor), and Barnstaple (38 miles). Even travelling the relatively short distance to Exeter, the nearest of these, would have been difficult. It was dangerous for a man to be alone on the forest paths, for he risked being attacked by thieves or even by wolves, which were still roaming wild in England. The trackways were rough and you would have had to ford the River Teign, which in winter had the force to sweep people off their feet. It was also risky to leave your property and family unattended back home, as they might be set upon by outlaws. As a consequence, ordinary people in 1001 did not travel far. The social structures that would require their descendants to journey considerable distances – the courts, Parliament, fairs and networks of religious orders – barely existed. People living in this far-flung corner of Christendom stayed among their own kind, where they felt safe: neighbours and kinsmen were the only people on whom they could depend to protect them and their families, to trade fairly with them, and to help them in times of famine.
In this way we begin to touch upon the real differences between my way of life and that of my predecessors in Moretonhampstead. The human race in 1001 was not just illiterate, superstitious, ignorant of the outside world and devoid of spiritual supervision; it faced continual hardships and dangers. Hunger and deprivation were widespread. Society was violent, and to protect yourself you had to meet force with force. In addition to the home-grown thieves and murderers, Vikings had attacked England intermittently over the last two centuries. In 997 they burnt the small market town of Lydford, on the north-western side of Dartmoor, and destroyed the abbey of Tavistock to the south-west. In 1001 they returned to Devon and attacked and burnt Exeter before turning east (fortunately for Moreton) and destroying the villages of Broadclyst and Pinhoe. But there was no guarantee that they would not return next year, sail up the River Exe to Exeter, and then try their luck to the west. King Ethelred could not have dragged his army along the remnants of Roman roads as far as Devon and through the forest paths to Moreton quickly enough to save the villagers from such attacks, even if he had wanted to do so. If the Vikings were to return, all the villagers could do was gather up their children and run and hide on the barren moor or in the woods.
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bsp; How representative is this description of other parts of Christendom? As you would expect, there were significant variations even within England. If you travelled the 13 miles over the hills from Moreton to Crediton, you would find a more heavily populated manor, where the bishop of Devon was the lord. In his house you would even discover a couple of manuscript books: one about the early Christian martyrs and the other an encyclopedia compiled by the ninth-century French scholar Hrabanus Maurus. If you left Crediton and travelled into Exeter, you would find merchants and priests living within the old Roman walls. There was a market at the centre of town but still you would have been struck by the agricultural appearance of the place, which was home to fewer than a thousand souls. Winchester, then the capital of England, had a population of about 6,000. London, the largest urban settlement in the kingdom, had more than 10,000, many of whom resided in Lundenwic, or Aldwych, the port to the west of the city. In the south-eastern counties there were more people, more churches, and thus more priests than in Devon. There, coins were more regularly used and markets more common. Kent, for example, had 10 boroughs or places with a market (3.5 per 500 square miles, compared to Devon’s 0.8), with a commensurately greater level of local travel. Even some long-distance journeys were undertaken: London toll regulations refer to traders arriving from Normandy. But although the Viking attacks had not entirely extinguished international trade, their threat was universal. And so was the fear of violence.
Further afield, you would have found even greater variations. Differences in economic prosperity and urban sophistication were to be seen all across Europe. With regard to religion, in 1001 Christendom was on the brink of achieving its familiar pan-European form. Wales, Scotland and Ireland were all independent Christian countries but with violent internal divisions even more marked than those of England. Scandinavia was only partially converted to Christianity, with areas of Norway resisting conversion. In eastern Europe, the kingdom of Poland had become Christian in 966. The kingdom of Lithuania remained pagan, as did the Slavs, but the kingdom of Kiev – lorded over by the Rus, the Vikings who gave their name to Russia – had started to turn to Christianity in 988. The Magyars lived in what is now Hungary. A century earlier, they had pushed into western Europe, fighting their way through the Holy Roman Empire into Burgundy and France, where they continued to raid until 955. In 1001 they too were in the process of being converted to Christianity by the recently crowned King Stephen I, who had defeated his pagan uncle. In the north of Spain, the Christian kingdoms of León (including Castile) and Navarre (including Aragon), and the independent county of Barcelona had started the Reconquista: the fight to recover what is now Spain and Portugal from the Muslim caliphate of Córdoba that would last until the end of the fifteenth century. Thus Christendom was expanding rapidly from its central core into northern, eastern and southern Europe – but not without a daily breaking of the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’
The central core of the Christian world was dominated by the Holy Roman Empire, which stretched from the north coast of Germany all the way south to Rome and included Austria, northern Italy and Lotharingia (comprising the Low Countries, eastern France and the Rhineland). It was governed by the Holy Roman Emperor, who was often the ruler of one of its many constituent duchies, magravates, counties or kingdoms. In his capacity as emperor, however, he was an elected spiritual monarch, chosen by a college of archbishops and secular lords. The empire’s neighbour to the west, the Christian kingdom of France, was ruled by the recently established dynasty of Hugh Capet, but it was only about half the size of modern France. To the south-east there was the independent Christian kingdom of Burgundy, which reached from Auxerre to Switzerland and down to the Mediterranean coast of Provence.
It was in the Mediterranean kingdoms that daily life was most markedly different from England. Córdoba was one of the richest and most sophisticated cities in the world, with levels of trade and learning that outstripped anything to be found in Christendom; perhaps as many as half a million people lived there. The architecture was on a truly splendid scale – as shown by the Great Mosque, which still stands today. It was said that the caliph’s library housed more than 400,000 volumes. In Italy, people were living in towns more or less as they had done in the days of the Roman Empire. It was home to the largest trading settlements in western Christendom: Pavia, Milan and Amalfi each had perhaps 12–15,000 inhabitants, with the maritime states of Venice, Pisa and Genoa following close behind.
The only part of Christendom as wealthy and sophisticated as the caliphate of Córdoba was the Byzantine Empire, in particular its capital city, Constantinople, which was at the height of its prosperity in the early eleventh century. Estimates vary wildly, but its population was probably around 400,000. It also had a highly developed judicial system, economic links across the Middle East, and jaw-dropping wealth. From the Great Palace, the emperor in 1001, Basil II, commanded an area that covered the whole of the north-eastern Mediterranean coast, including southern Italy, most of the Balkans, Greece and Anatolia (modern Turkey) as far as the border with Palestine. He also ruled the Greek islands, Cyprus, Crete and part of the northern coast of the Black Sea. Near the Great Palace was the church of St Sophia, with a massive dome 182 feet in height – it was by far the largest building in Christendom. Works of art had been collected from all over the ancient world by the fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine and placed here to adorn the city he had made his capital. Ancient Greek bronze sculptures stood near Ancient Egyptian obelisks. In 1001, Rome, the original capital of the empire, was insignificant by comparison: its walls surrounded an area only half the size of Constantinople, its artworks had fallen or been stolen, and sheep and cattle now grazed among the ruins on the city’s famous hills. As for the rest of Christendom, the sophisticated Byzantines regarded them as mere barbarians.
Given these extremes – from a handful of self-sufficient farmers struggling to get by in their earth-walled houses on the wet hills of Moreton to the gilded brilliance of Muslim Córdoba and the huge wealth of Christian Constantinople – it might seem impossible to identify developments that changed the whole of the nascent Western world. And yet despite everything that divided them, they had more in common than contemporaries would have realised. When the bishop of Barcelona wished to buy two rare books from a Jew in 1043, he did not pay in silver but with a house and a piece of land, showing that non-monetary purchases might be undertaken even by the educated and prosperous citizens of the Mediterranean region.2 If a famine gripped Europe, everyone suffered – including the Byzantines, who saw high prices and reduced trade. If a disease spread anywhere in Christendom, it killed rich and poor alike. And no one, anywhere, was ever free from the violence of the time. England was conquered by Duke William of Normandy in 1066, and it was another Norman, Robert Guiscard, who occupied the southern Italian possessions of the Byzantine Empire in 1060–8. True to the saying that ‘he who has the most has the most to lose’, the Byzantine emperor, Romanos Diogenes, was captured at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, and as a result of this defeat, Anatolia was lost to the Seljuk Turks. While he was still a captive, a coup d’etat toppled him from power in Constantinople. Later he was blinded, and died of his injuries in a monastery. Frankly, he would have been safer in Moreton.
The growth of the Western Church
There is no doubt that most scholars would identify the rise of the Roman Catholic Church as the single greatest change of the eleventh century. It was a consequence, in part at least, of the states on the periphery of Christendom turning to the Church of Rome. This geographical expansion underpinned the rise of the papacy as a pan-European power, with wide-ranging political and moral authority It also led to an increase in the power of the Church generally, and thus brought about a series of changes that affected the whole of society. Without this growth, the Middle Ages would not have unfolded in the way they did.
Between 955 and 1100, Western Christendom doubled in size. It was not an instantaneous transformati
on: many places resisted the Christian faith for decades, but over the period almost the whole of western Europe came to live and worship under the cross. The reasons for this are complex; no doubt missionary zeal played its part, but a more important factor was the desire among rulers either to stabilise their realm against violent neighbours, or to extend their authority by conquering new lands. To do either of these things they needed alliances, and the Catholic Church provided a moral framework within which to establish bonds of trust. And as more princes adopted the Catholic faith, the Church became ever more powerful and attractive – a snowball effect – making the localised pagan religions insignificant. On top of this, rulers saw advantages in adopting a religion that was essentially a dictatorship. The Catholic Church reinforced a monarch’s own authority and, through its hierarchical philosophy, helped him stabilise and control his kingdom.
In return, such a rapidly growing patrimony naturally increased the political power of the pope, though it intensified his rivalry with the patriarch of Constantinople. Nominally the pope, as the successor of Rome’s first bishop, St Peter, took precedence, but this primacy was rarely stated overtly and thus was open to question. In an attempt to clarify matters, Pope Leo IX sent a delegation to Constantinople in 1054, charging its members with requiring the patriarch, Cerularius, to acknowledge the supremacy of the Roman pontiff. The fine political balance of the past was upset – and so was Cerularius. He flatly denied that the Roman Church had authority over the Byzantine Empire. The Roman delegates duly excommunicated him; Cerularius replied by excommunicating them. From that moment on, the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches went their separate ways. Hence the year 1054 is seen as a momentous date in the history of the Church. In reality it was just the formal recognition of a division that had been growing for centuries. Significantly for the pope, however, it was the patriarch who was soon on the back foot, following the collapse of Byzantine authority in Italy in the 1060s and the loss of Anatolia in 1071.
