by Ian Mortimer
The principal agent of change
Major changes in society are rarely the work of one mind, and never one hand. Most of the great developments of the past were not the product of a single genius but of a great number of people who thought along the same lines and saw similar opportunities. It is therefore almost impossible to align social change with individual decision-making. Like the nature of change itself, which is easy to define on a small scale but impossible when there are so many factors, it is difficult to identify the true impact of an individual on a continent over a whole century. Nevertheless, it is a salutary exercise to consider individual contributions, if only to see how limited they were and how change was due to many thousands of decision-makers.
In 1978, a popular American writer, Michael Hart, selected the hundred people whom he considered were the most influential of all time.11 It was a fairly arbitrary list and was sorely lacking in intellectual rigour (as indicated by his inclusion in the second edition of the earl of Oxford as the author of Shakespeare’s plays). However, as a boy, I found it quite stimulating, and that was surely the author’s intention. His list contained two individuals from the eleventh century: William the Conqueror and Pope Urban II. While William’s decision to invade England in 1066 undoubtedly marks him out as the principal agent of change for anyone living in this country, his actions were of far less consequence elsewhere in Europe. We must also remember that he left most Anglo-Saxon institutions intact: life did not change nearly as much as people generally suppose. As for Pope Urban II, he might have triggered the crusading movement and encouraged the Reconquista, but in Europe, the Crusades were more important for their symbolism than their achievements. And in Spain, the kings of Navarre and León hardly needed any encouragement to fight the crumbling caliphate of Córdoba. Both William I and Urban II were certainly significant characters, but if we are to consider all of eleventh-century Europe, they are both dwarfed by a figure whom Michael Hart ignored – Hildebrand, otherwise known as Pope Gregory VII.
Even before he was pope, as archdeacon of the Roman Church Hildebrand played a major role in imposing papal primacy over the Holy Roman Emperor. He was the proponent of the Gregorian Reforms that came to define Catholic priesthood. His vision of the clergy as a body separate from the secular world, and his drive to impose the authority of the papacy over rulers and subjects, changed Christendom. Can you imagine a medieval Europe in which the pope was a mere imperial appointee and the Church was without political influence? That Urban II received such an overwhelming response when he preached at Clermont in 1095 may well have been down to his oratory and religious zeal, as well as the attraction of the opportunities for conquest he outlined, but he had to thank Gregory VII for giving him such a platform. It was Gregory who had first mooted the idea of an armed expedition to help the Eastern Christians, in 1074. Urban II must therefore take second place to Gregory VII. Towards the end of his pontificate, Gregory was ousted from Rome by the emperor, dying in exile a year later, in 1085, but this does not diminish his achievement. Not all great lives end well, and certainly the manner of a man’s death should not make us discount his successes in life. Gregory turned the papacy into the single most important voice in Christendom and raised the standing of clergymen above that of those who fought and those who worked, thereby empowering learning and debate, without which European society could not have developed as it did.
1101–1200
The Twelfth Century
On Christmas Eve 1144, the Crusader state of Edessa fell to the Muslim commander Zengi. All the Christian knights who were captured were slaughtered; their wives and children were rounded up and sold as slaves. It was an event that traumatised Christendom. A stunned Pope Eugenius III commissioned his old friend and mentor, Bernard of Clairvaux, to preach a new Crusade to win back God’s patrimony. Bernard had started life as a Cistercian monk but subsequently proved himself a diplomat of the first order. On 31 March 1146, he read out Eugenius’s papal bull in the church at Vézélay and started to speak to the assembled throng in his own inimitable manner. Soon men were crying, ‘Crosses! Give us crosses!’ as they swore to fight for Christ. The French king, who was in the congregation, undertook to go to the Holy Land himself. Inspired by his example and Bernard’s rhetoric, many of his nobles did likewise. Over subsequent weeks, as Bernard made his journey into Germany to preach to the Holy Roman Emperor, people reported miracles everywhere he went. The fervour grew. Bernard himself wrote to the pope: ‘You ordered; I obeyed . . . I spoke and at once the crusaders have multiplied to infinity. Villages and towns are now deserted. You will scarcely find one man for every seven women. Everywhere you will see widows whose husbands are still alive.’ Finally, at Speyer, Bernard called on all his skills to persuade the reluctant emperor to join the Crusade. After two days’ trying, he raised his arms and held out his hands as if he himself was Christ on the cross, and cried aloud before the court: ‘Man, what ought I to have done for you that I have not done?’ The stunned emperor bowed and swore to fight to recapture Jerusalem.
The twelfth century offers us a whole host of dramatic moments like this, as well as a glorious array of extraordinary characters. It was the century of the lovers Peter Abelard and Héloise, of the composer-abbess Hildegard von Bingen, and of the greatest knight of the Middle Ages, William Marshal. It witnessed such colourful characters as Frederick Barbarossa, Henry II and Thomas Becket. It saw queens come to the fore: the Empress Matilda, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Tamar of Georgia. It also saw a whole string of rulers with leonine nicknames – William the Lion, Henry the Lion and Richard the Lionheart – as well as kings with more unusual epithets, such as David the Builder, Umberto the Blessed and Louis the Fat. The names of the military orders, especially the Knights Templar and Hospitaller, still have resonance. It was the first great age of chivalry, the century that invented heraldry and tournament fighting. At the same time it was robust and earthy in its culture too, giving us the great Latin poets the Archpoet and Hugh Primas, as well as the troubadours, who composed their moving poems to delight and seduce their ladies (or, more frequently, other men’s ladies).
It is striking how many stories and phrases from the period have remained current in our culture. Most famous, perhaps, is Henry II’s declaration, ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ when he had had enough of his chancellor, Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury. Then there is the immortal line uttered by the Master of the Templars to the Master of the Hospitallers at the Springs of Cressen in 1187, when the latter suggested that it might be foolish for 600 knights to attack the 14,000 troops of Saladin’s army arrayed before them: ‘You love your blond head too well to want to lose it.’ And who can forget the bravado of William the Lion, King of Scotland, as he launched himself into a completely hopeless attack on the English at the Battle of Alnwick shouting: ‘Now we’ll see who among us are good knights.’ In the midst of so much bloodshed, you can understand why the twelfth-century chronicler Roger of Hoveden noted that a man ‘is not fit for battle who has never seen his own blood flow, who has not heard his teeth crunch under the blow of an opponent, or felt the full weight of his adversary upon him’.1
These characters and stories give us an impression of the age: bloody, brave, confident, wilful and passionate. And yet they have little to do with the most profound changes of the period. It was humble peasants, lawyers and scholars who had the most significant impact on the twelfth century. You could argue that the Crusades brought West and East into contact with one another, to the cultural enrichment of the West. That would be true to a certain extent, but the East-West relationship was far more productively exploited in cities where Christian scholars could work on Arabic and Greek manuscripts in relative peace. And while the Crusader states of Antioch, Edessa, Tripoli and Jerusalem may have led the way in castle design that had far-reaching influence across the whole of Europe, they did little to change the castle’s basic function, which was to permit garrisons to withstand sieges. The deeper
changes in society were to be found elsewhere.
Population growth
The period from about 1050 saw significant economic growth in Europe. Huge areas of forest and moorland were cleared and much marshland was drained, adding considerably to the area of land under cultivation. A bird’s-eye view of the continent would have seen it alter from a predominantly forested area to one dominated by fields. The clearances were the result of a marked increase in the population, the causes of which are still debated by historians. One possible reason was the gradual introduction of a harness for horses to draw ploughs. Unlike oxen, which can pull a great weight from a simple yoke, horses cannot be yoked together as the fastenings bite their necks and cut off the arterial circulation. Thus they require a much more protective harness in order to till the land. This technology, which had been known in the ancient world but subsequently lost, was reintroduced in the twelfth century. It spread very slowly, however: even in the fifteenth century, about two thirds of draught animals in use in England were oxen.2 Nevertheless, the use of horses as well as oxen in some places can only have added to the tractive energy available for clearing and ploughing the land.
A more important cause of population growth was what historians call the Medieval Warm Period. The average temperature rose very slowly in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and by the twelfth it was almost a degree warmer than it had been before 900. This may not sound like a huge difference: we barely notice if the temperature changes by one degree. But as an annual average, it has an enormous impact. As the historian Geoffrey Parker has pointed out, in temperate zones ‘a fall of 0.5°C in the average spring temperature prolongs the risk of the last frost by ten days, while a similar fall in the average autumn temperature advances the risk of the first frost by the same amount. Either event suffices to kill the entire crop.’3 It follows that the reverse, an increase of just o.5°C, reduces these risks. Furthermore, the danger alters according to the altitude of the land. According to Parker, a drop of 0.5°C doubles the risk of a single harvest failure at low level, and increases the risk of two consecutive harvest failures at that level sixfold, but it increases the risk of consecutive harvest failures above 1,000 feet one hundred times. An increase of 0.5°C thus meant the difference between life and death for many people. Fewer severe winter days would have meant that fewer crops were lost to frost. Slightly warmer summers would have meant that there was a reduced risk of harvest failure and, over time, a greater yield from the grain planted. Consequently there was more food on average, and fewer children died.
A modest decrease in child mortality doesn’t sound as if it should be a contender for one of the most significant changes in Western history, but when that phenomenon is extrapolated across Europe for the whole two and a half centuries of the Medieval Warm Period, it becomes hugely important. The surviving children had families of their own, and many of their children survived too; and they in turn cleared more land and harvested enough food to sustain a larger population still in the next generation. Without grain surpluses, there could have been no cultural expansion. There would have been no spare labourers to build the monasteries, castles and cathedrals, and scholars would have had to work in the fields rather than read books. Those initial few extra lives had an exponential effect for the simple reason that Europe was abundant in potentially fertile land. It just needed the manpower to bring it into cultivation.
The clearances of the natural landscape each began in one of two ways – individually, as a result of a peasant’s initiative, or collectively, at the instigation of a manorial bailiff. In the individual cases, a man managing a smallholding of five or six acres might have realised that he would not be able to feed his growing family with so little land. Even in a good year it would not have left him with a surplus to sell at market or to store for security in case of a bad harvest in the future. Having identified one or two acres of overgrown or wooded land nearby, he would have arranged with the manorial bailiff to cut down the trees and plant the land with crops, and to hold it thenceforth in return for an additional rent. Such a development pleased everyone: the peasant had more land to work and greater security for his family, and the manorial bailiff and his lord were happy with the extra rent. When the peasant’s sons grew up, they could help to clear another four or five acres. And so on.
Collective clearance tended to be concerned with large-scale drainage and irrigation projects. The bailiff would employ the tenants of the manor to spend a specified number of days digging ditches and building dykes. When the work was done, the new land was apportioned amongst existing or new tenants. Some manors belonging to a monastic order might even be cleared by the monks themselves, labouring in the true spirit of the Rule of St Benedict. Thousands of acres of European forest were cut down and marshland drained by the Cistercians over the course of the twelfth century.
It is difficult to measure the extent of these clearances. Literacy was still so rare that lords and their clerks did not record the borders of manors on a regular basis, still less the specific strips of lands held by their tenants. Several manorial charters allowing ‘assarting’ – clearing the land for farming – survive, but these individual grants hardly establish the full extent of the process. Our best measure, therefore, is population growth itself. But this too is difficult to quantify. The most complete figures we have for the period are those for England, due to the unique survival of Domesday Book (1086), the only comprehensive survey of a kingdom and its wealth in the eleventh century. Estimates based on Domesday reveal the population of England to have been in the region of 1.7 million. Poll tax records from 1377 show that the population had by then grown to about 2.5 million, and it would have been much higher before the famines of 1315–22 and the Black Death of 1348–9. From these and other pieces of data, we can estimate that the population rose from about 1.8 million in 1100 to almost 3.4 million in 1200. The implication is that England’s farmland in 1200 was nearly twice as productive as it had been at the start of the century. The only explanation for a population increase on this scale is that huge swathes of the kingdom had been brought under the plough for the first time. More land resulted in more food, which meant that more people felt secure enough to marry and raise a family, and their children were better fed. And every generation in turn brought more land into cultivation, leading to further population expansion.
How did the rest of Europe fare in the twelfth century? As shown in the Appendix (page 347), historians have come up with contrasting figures. One recent set of estimates by Paolo Malanima suggests that Europe’s population as a whole grew by 38 per cent in the twelfth century. However, if we take the three best-documented countries – England, France and Italy – and construct a model for the core of Europe based on their population figures, by projecting back from the well-established figure of 84 million for 1500, we get a very different picture for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which suggests that the population rose by 49 and 48 per cent respectively to a total of over 100 million by 1300. Whatever the exact figures, there can be little doubt that the period from 1050 to 1250 saw the bulk of the clearances that enabled such growth. The popular image of the age might be that of chain-mail-clad Crusaders dealing out crunching mace blows on the helms of their adversaries, but the real powerhouse of social change in the twelfth century was their estates, wrought by hardworking peasants whose names are unknown to us and whose only memorial lies in the newly tilled fields they left behind.
The expansion of the monastic network
The very fact that Pope Eugenius III called upon Bernard of Clairvaux to preach the Second Crusade hints at another major twelfth-century development. Bernard was a monk and thus was supposed to have withdrawn from the world to live a secluded life of contemplation. Yet here we see him travelling far and wide, meeting kings and preaching to huge crowds. Moreover, wherever he went, his reputation preceded him. When a controversy over the election of the pope broke out in 1130, Bernard was asked to decide which candidate should be n
ominated. He chose Innocent II and then travelled around Europe for several years trying to persuade the rulers who had supported the other candidate to switch sides. In 1145, the principal reason for Eugenius being elected pope was that he was a friend of Bernard. Bernard’s influence and reputation also gave a huge impetus to his religious order. Thousands of people now flocked to join the Cistercian order, which had been founded in 1098 and whose monks vowed to lead an austere life strictly governed by the Rule of St Benedict. By 1152, the order had more than 330 monasteries spread across Europe, and in the second half of the century it expanded further, into eastern Europe, Scotland and Ireland. By the end of the century it had also added several dozen nunneries.
The Cistercians were not the only monastic order on the rise. The Carthusians opted for an even more austere existence, living in cells around the cloisters of their charterhouses. There were also several orders of religious clerics, such as the Order of Canons Regular (the Augustinians), whose lifestyle closely resembled that of monks. William of Champeaux established the Order of the Canons of St Victor (the Victorines) in 1108; Bernard’s friend Norbert of Xanten founded the Premonstratensian order in 1120; and Gilbert of Sempringham set up the Gilbertines in 1148. When combined with crusading zeal, the monastic spirit led to a similar growth in the military orders, whose duties included prayer and the protection of pilgrims. The Knights Hospitaller developed in the wake of the success of the First Crusade. The Order of Knights Templar, founded in 1118, was enthusiastically supported by Bernard of Clairvaux. In Castile in the 1150s, the Cistercians set up their own military wing, the Order of Calatrava, and the Teutonic Knights were established towards the end of the century. These were just the most notable orders; many more flourished to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land.
